For the brands that are most suited to the modern retail economy: media and commerce operations combine to optimize for audience and conversion. This is the efficient path for sustained growth, retention, and profitability.
The Peacock Network is now in the eCommerce technology business. It’s worth repeating: shopping cart technologies may become commoditized. It will be the audiences that will be bought and sold.
The stronger the organic audience, the higher the premium on a company’s valuation. So why the resistance towards this approach? In short, it isn’t easy to do.
Audience-driven businesses have figured out how to monetize their visitors by providing value that captures attention. The alternative is paying the audience just to show up at your party.
The rise and demise of brands’ dependence on social platforms will mirror media’s former dependence on these same platforms. The savviest brands are becoming their own publishers.
From TikTok’s upcoming phone to three million dollar purses for Fortnite tournament victories, Generation Z’s influence on the market is creating unique outcomes. To understand the future, listen to the kids.
By reclassifying app downloads as the beginning of a sales funnel (rather than its end), digital content communities can reframe the value of their content.
This era has begun to reveal sharp contrasts in how Americans approach the consumption of goods and services. Net consumption continues to grow despite a catastrophic number of store closures. Some in retail and media are quietly recognizing that the most competitive approach to growth is the pursuit of the modern luxury consumer – a cohort that seems to be invulnerable to these shifts.
As the pandemic underscored, the physical retail and service industries have squeezed the middle class. As consumers will search for ease and quality elsewhere eCommerce has a rebalancing act ahead of it.
When choosing between mass adoption or sustaining aspiration, don’t. Instead, pursue a compromise of both.
The early 21st century resembles a time when the middle class barely existed. For commerce and its adjacent industries, this new era is a correction that can no longer be ignored.
To achieve veblen brand status, cultivate patience. Those who have are still succeeding today.
Sears once thrived on the principles meeting customers where they were. Evolving customer needs requires leadership that understands where consumer mindshare and dollars are going.
The American Dream wasn't a promise but it was a hope. Equity in education was a path for many to meet that hope. That equity is being tested more than it has in nearly 70 years.
Between 1955 and 1975, shopping mall development exploded. Though, development was no longer tied to demand. Many were built as extractable retail assets only to be flipped for massive profits. This meant that development was no longer tied to population growth. Today, multiple malls and shopping centers exist for every small suburb in America, designed and constructed with no expectation to achieve sustainable demand.
Malls will always thrive as experiential distractions. But sometimes, a consumer wants a pair of pants from Saks at their door and before dinner. A Connected Mall can compete for a consumer in ways that Amazon cannot.
The mall began in the American midwest, designed to challenge automobile-dependency. Now, they’re simply shopping centers - relics of an incomplete vision.
Smaller neighborhoods are buzzing with the noise of DTC insurgents. Will malls listen?
We moved tens of millions of Americans to empty parcels of land with cars and more stores, per capita, than any place on earth. And we told ourselves that the bubble would never pop. To understand retail’s power and pitfalls, start with the German architect’s based philosophies. His solution for American sprawl in 1956 is a panacea for today’s empty malls.
Over the last 55 years, we developed suburbs into self-sustained cities and built shopping malls as if demand would never slow. Then: eCommerce entered the chat.
The HENRYs are advancers, not necessarily those who have cleared the wealth bar to America’s elite class. Unlike the traditional middle-class, HENRYs have the inclination to believe that they are on the path to the liquidity. A liquidity and safety net that is necessary for investing in long-term assets. HENRY is a transitional cohort, not a class. A cohort that can no longer be ignored.
Every week, there is a new retailer in distress. It’s time to consider how much of America’s retail economy was built on a class of consumers that was never as static as once believed: the middle class.
The signals of aspirational upward mobility have drastically changed. It was once a popped collar. It’s now a strategic subtlety.
Easy to miss: in their decade-long battle, Amazon and niche digital malls aren’t fighting for sales but attention. Every retailer will have to become a media brand. And every media brand will have to become a retailer.
In 1936, a young man from Ohio showed up to the Berlin Olympics wearing shoes designed by a young German cobbler. Our children know both of their names. They wear that cobbler’s shoes. What symbolism will come of our own interesting age?
The biggest indicator VCs should consider is whether a society is ready to embrace a new trend or an idea. Whether there is a brand to suit that shift is answered by studying society, not an algorithm.
The history of digitally native vertical brand (DNVB) goes back 14 years. However, the framing of the industry has evolved and so has its terminology. Appointed by Bonobos’ founder and current Walmart executive Andy Dunn in 2016, the DNVB acronym has given way to a simpler version: “DTC” or direct-to-consumer. But despite a shift in terminology, Dunn's term has appropriately defined a generation of internet-first retailers.
Can DTC insurgents kill the incumbents? Will they cool the embers of their cash reserves? And: can they sustain the innovation?
Generous activism, gentle marketing, and the fortune of good timing birthed the official Outfitter of Mental Health. LVMH agreed.
Of the 729 growing, private DNVBs we studied, the vast majority compete in the same three spaces of the home. The savviest will aim for #1 in an empty room.
The previous twelve years of DNVB development may be viewed as a preamble in ten years’ time. The first two weeks of the pandemic are a filter for DTC’s future.
“What marketing executive has ever said ‘ignore brand’?” Ask the 1,000 operators at CommerceNext.
It’s rare that the down-market brand maintains the advantage over the up-market competitor. But the data and observations suggest that Away is in rare air.
Time will tell who holds the advantage as brands compete on traditional grounds, but Andy Dunn is now a Walmart executive. This represents the end of the curve and the closing of the Book of DNVB.
Patience is a virtue. This virtue is a key to early brand development. Waiting for your first 100 "true fans" is a true competitive advantage.
The United States once led in the effort to digitize its economy. Today, we trail China by a factor of three. Our neglect may have damning consequences without a correction in our course. The direct-to-consumer industry can be myopic, even often worth ignoring. But studying DTC as a philosophy for modernization can be a competitive advantage for entire economies. For a moment, jettison words like luxe, digitally native, lifestyle, or even HENRY – they are symptoms of a shift. The focus here is on the core of that shift.
When DTC principles enter the big budget movie industry, it will present a tipping point for how we consume Hollywood films. Here, I argue that Disney will be first to upsell film debuts in their new Disney+ app.
For one of the most technically-advanced industries, commerce is as dependent on technical wizardry as it is on human resources. These roles will be as pivotal as ever.
Like the three revolutions before it, DTC-fication can achieve economies of scale that will inspire a stronger consumer confidence and newer opportunity. Releasing a blockbuster movie online could inspire the industry to follow suit.
A competition between Netflix and Disney+ left Quibi a casualty in its first year as a consumer product. Disney has proven that it wasn’t going to throw away its shot.
As Amazon cannibalizes the physical retail world that Walmart built long before it, it’ll be a chief executive choice between short-term discomfort and long-term growth, or short-term gain and long-term struggle.
I believe that we must begin viewing investments into our eCommerce infrastructure no differently than our predecessors viewed their investments into roads, bridges, and tunnels. This may sound grandiose until you consider how the rest of the digital and physical economies will depend on that infrastructure.
An election year effort to reinvigorate our retail economy may win hearts, but the new agglomeration isn’t within a trendy city or neighborhood, it’s on the internet. And retail will be too.
The purposes, discomforts, and requirements of this new infrastructure are akin to the winding roads that serve our industries today – the ones that Eisenhower envisioned.
No longer a relative luxury, eCommerce dependency must expand beyond tangible essentials. We have a new, great infrastructure. Our cities and its leaders will need to build on it, around it, and with it.
Computers became the bicycles for our minds. And now, mobile advancements are influencing physical mobility. The smartest cities will correct for these advancements before the markets correct it for them.
On the fourth day of the SARS epidemic, Alibaba changed how an entire country consumed products and services. With superior American infrastructure and connectivity, it’s time we do the same.
Product-based communities have augmented many consumers’ lives, influencing their senses of belonging. In this way, America has not become non-religious. Rather, we've spent the last several decades forging new communities. These types of communities don’t show up in political polls. We believe in brands.
Product is an incomplete notion without brand equity. And that equity cannot be sustained without deep camaraderie between unfamiliar people.
Some semblance of community and camaraderie is better than none at all. Because there are no atheists in foxholes. We all want to believe in something.
Gated media communities like Trapital, Stratechery, and Thing Testing have become the antidote to the noise of digital commonplaces. A subscription is a vote for the future.
At the intersection of influence and efficacy, sociological advantages have interfaced with an ecosystem of software as a service.
The next big moment will come from an improbable entrepreneur with an idea, an audience, and a product to sell. Empowerment is this era’s great economic innovation. For some of us, it’s almost like flight.
When we were younger, we built for a physical world. Generation Z and Gen Alpha are focused on building within digital worlds.