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8 thoughts on consumer brands / distribution / media... mused on for two years & finally ordered after a bunch of convos with incredible fellows @beondeck (thread)
1/ The consumer's biggest challenge is dealing with an abundance of products / services & content. If data is the new oil, context is the new data.
2/ On the brand-side, the internet ended the days of building a mass-market lifestyle brand - FB ads briefly created an arbitrage window that enabled certain brands to get to scale...this shut.
3/ New brands that are managing to 'cross the chasm' without pre-existing celeb audiences are in super vanilla product categories (black leggings, suitcases, woollen trainers) that have huge TAMs, but relatively little cult appeal (no out-group = no in-group)
4/ If you've built retail-first, you can rely on bottom of funnel, intent-driven search. But for brands selling product + identity bundles, FB is the only place you can rent the data needed to find people who want to buy into the version of the good life you're selling
5/ Yet Amazon's product data (money spent) + Netflix's viewing data (time spent) are stronger signals of demand than cheap likes.
6/ There's a lot of untapped value in the niches - question is how to 'mine the depths' of these categories vs achieving horizontal scale. LTV / subscription ftw.
7/ When shopping, people are increasingly focused on discovering via JTBD, e.g 'look' / 'skincare result'.. brands and products are old news & there's opportunity for post-purchase support.
8/ Yet not all categories are suited to 'social shopping'. E.g. women's underwear - purchasing decision largely individual, no referral built into the product and not an enabler: 'buy x bra to *be a woman*' doesn't have same cache as 'buy leggings to *be an athlete*'
