Retail Marketing Quotes

No product irrespective of how great it is can sell itself without being discovered with the power of marketing.

Marketing is an investment. Don’t treat it like sales.

The change from shopping in-stores to shopping online didn’t happen overnight. It was a big cultural change which took many years.

Word-of-mouth marketing is great. It can help you enter the market, but it cannot help you stay in the market or achieve rapid long-term growth.

If our personal lives need marketing, how can we even think that our business can go on without it?

Footwear, apparel, accessories, cosmetics - they all belong to the ecommerce category or retail category, but they all are very different industries and require their own research.

A bad product may or may not succeed with marketing, but a good product will definitely never succeed without proper marketing.

Marketing needs to be ethical. Anything which is not is generally a wrong marketing technique.

Advertising is very powerful as it brings a business out of the darkness to the light and brings your products closer to your buyers.

The most important task of marketing is to communicate the value of your product to your audience.

Sex doesn't sell anything other than itself

If you want your customers to start eating spinach flavored ice cream, your idea won’t need as much cultural change as it will if you want your customers to start taking a coffee pill in the morning instead of fresh brewed coffee. Obviously, the latter will require more efforts and more marketing.

90 percent of all Gillette shavers are bought by women for the men in their lives

90% of new business fail in the first three months of launching, due to lack of proper planning, wrong selection of niche/products and marketing platform.

For official record, if become bankrupt old retail distribution centers-labeled supermega, so-enlarged foodstuff market- later reincarnate to become worship shrine. First sell food-stuff, next then same structure sell battered furnitures, next now born as gymnasium club, next broker flea markets, only at final end of life...sell religions.

In today's consumer-driven economy, a strong marketing strategy is essential for success. Board members with marketing expertise can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior, brand positioning, and digital marketing strategies. This is especially crucial for companies in consumer goods, retail, and technology sectors.

Having too many retail investors present in capital markets causes distortions in valuations.

Marketing is not a department Do you have a marketing department? If not, good. If you do, don’t think these are the only people responsible for marketing. Accounting is a department. Marketing isn’t. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365. Just as you cannot not communicate, you cannot not market: Every time you answer the phone, it’s marketing. Every time you send an e-mail, it’s marketing. Every time someone uses your product, it’s marketing. Every word you write on your Web site is marketing. If you build software, every error message is marketing. If you’re in the restaurant business, the after-dinner mint is marketing. If you’re in the retail business, the checkout counter is marketing. If you’re in a service business, your invoice is marketing. Recognize that all of these little things are more important than choosing which piece of swag to throw into a conference goodie bag. Marketing isn’t just a few individual events. It’s the sum total of everything you do.

SOME PEOPLE ARE JUST born unlucky—so unlucky in fact that they do just the opposite of what they should at exactly the wrong time. Suckers? Maybe. But in the business of investing, those people have a name: retail investors.

Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, owns no inventory. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.

Retaining (of customers and employees) wins retailing.

SEO is equivalent to building your reputation in society. It takes significant time and patience to build it, while once built you will hold it for a long time.

By being customer-focused instead of retail-focused, or factory-focused, a manufacturer or merchant can widely increase its offerings, thus increasing share of wallet.

These investigations also revealed that corporate inspectors were unable to recognize infections unless there was pus oozing out of an abscess. In fact, it appears that in our nation's meatpacking plants, contaminated meat is the rule, rather than the exception; researchers from the University of Minnesota found that in over a thousand food samples from numerous retail markets, 69 percent of the pork and beef and 92 percent of the poultry were contaminated with fecal matter that contained the potentially dangerous bacterium E. coli, and according to a recent study published in the Journal of Food Protection fecal contamination was found in 85 percent of fish fillets procured from retail markets and the Internet.52

A Maven is a person who has information on a lot of different products or prices or places. This person likes to initiate discussions with consumers and respond to requests," Price says. "They like to be helpers in the marketplace. They distribute coupons. They take you shopping. They go shopping for you....They distribute about four times as many coupons as other people. This is the person who connects people to the marketplace and has the inside scoop on the marketplace. They know where the bathroom is in retail stores. That's the kind of knowledge they have." They are more than experts. An expert, says Price, will "talk about, say, cars because they love cars. But they don't talk about cars because they love you, and want to help you with your decision. The Market Maven will. They are more socially motivated.

RULE #1 Market your business to the customer YOU WANT. Most beauty businesses try to be everything to everyone. It's exhausting and expensive promoting yourself to everyone. Most people simply give up. Focus on the customers you really want. What is your passion, what do you excel in? Who is your ideal customer? What would you ideally like to do every day in your business? Focus on what you want to do and the clients you want, and market directly to them and only them.

These are all commodity-focused issues. The old conceit of a retailer was that if you offered the right products at a fair price in a convenient location, you’d do fine if you watched your expenses. Today, the issues are totally different.

The first people to get the new money are the counterfeiters, which they use to buy various goods and services. The second receivers of the new money are the retailers who sell those goods to the counterfeiters. And on and on the new money ripples out through the system, going from one pocket or till to another. As it does so, there is an immediate redistribution effect. For first the counterfeiters, then the retailers, etc. have new money and monetary income they use to bid up goods and services, increasing their demand and raising the prices of the goods that they purchase. But as prices of goods begin to rise in response to the higher quantity of money, those who haven't yet received the new money find the prices of the goods they buy have gone up, while their own selling prices or incomes have not risen. In short, the early receivers of the new money in this market chain of events gain at the expense of those who receive the money toward the end of the chain, and still worse losers are the people (e.g., those on fixed incomes such as annuities, interest, or pensions) who never receive the new money at all.

Is it weird that when I see a cool t shirt or pick up a toothbrush or see a new car I don't think about the product itself? I think about the thousands of people and dollars to make it. I think about how the retailer that took the risk to buy and resell it. Then I work backwards to the store costs, the distributer who got it there, the shipping company that brought it over from China, the factory workers that made it, the people that sourced the materials and the people that harvested the raw materials, and on and on.. . The global economy is amazing. Your $20 t-shirt is a freaking miracle.

Globally, international retail sales are expected to reach an eye-watering $31 trillion by 2025. To keep that thermonuclear consumption going, not only do the products we buy need manufacturing, but so too do our desires for them. Hence, in the past forty or so years, the public relations, marketing, advertising and finance industries have boomed.

To re-create the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the sort we’d had at Chouinard Equipment, we broke the line into eight categories and hired eight product czars to manage them. Each was responsible for his or her own product development, marketing, inventory, quality control, and coordination with the three sales channels—wholesale, mail order, and retail.

The original Starbucks began in Pike Place Market (see p. 897) as a plain-Jane hole-in-the-wall coffee shop but, having awakened a coffee revolution, has been opening everywhere else since—there are now more than 10,000 Starbucks retail operations on the planet—and counting. Still in business, that first location attracts Starbucks pilgrims from all over the world.

So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself. Thus if one maintains that the State should not supply court services, and that private enterprise on the market could supply such service more efficiently as well as more morally, people tend to think of this as denying the importance of courts themselves. The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes to the public if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? How would the shoe firms be capitalized? How many brands would there be? What material would they use? What lasts? What would be the pricing arrangements for shoes? Wouldn’t regulation of the shoe industry be needed to see to it that the product is sound? And who would supply the poor with shoes? Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?” These questions, ridiculous as they seem to be and are with regard to the shoe business, are just as absurd when applied to the libertarian who advocates a free market in fire, police, postal service, or any other government operation. The point is that the advocate of a free market in anything cannot provide a “constructive” blueprint of such a market in advance. The essence and the glory of the free market is that individual firms and businesses, competing on the market, provide an ever-changing orchestration of efficient and progressive goods and services: continually improving products and markets, advancing technology, cutting costs, and meeting changing consumer demands as swiftly and as efficiently as possible.

Target’s donation was clearly aimed at electing a governor with free-market priorities that would benefit consumers, workers, and retailers. But left-wing activists didn’t care about this truth; they wanted to make Target an example. They combed through Emmer’s record, looking for a politically sensitive issue, and landed on the candidate’s opposition to gay marriage. At the time, Emmer wasn’t out of the mainstream in that position. In 2008, the majority of Americans still opposed gay marriage, as did, for the record, Barack Obama.

In fact, as these companies offered more and more (simply because they could), they found that demand actually followed supply. The act of vastly increasing choice seemed to unlock demand for that choice. Whether it was latent demand for niche goods that was already there or a creation of new demand, we don't yet know. But what we do know is that the companies for which we have the most complete data - netflix, Amazon, Rhapsody - sales of products not offered by their bricks-and-mortar competitors amounted to between a quarter and nearly half of total revenues - and that percentage is rising each year. in other words, the fastest-growing part of their businesses is sales of products that aren't available in traditional, physical retail stores at all. These infinite-shelf-space businesses have effectively learned a lesson in new math: A very, very big number (the products in the Tail) multiplied by a relatives small number (the sales of each) is still equal to a very, very big number. And, again, that very, very big number is only getting bigger. What's more, these millions of fringe sales are an efficient, cost-effective business. With no shelf space to pay for - and in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees - a niche product sold is just another sale, with the same (or better) margins as a hit. For the first time in history, hits and niches are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of being carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.

Every year or so I like to take a step back and look at a few key advertising, marketing, and media facts just to gauge how far removed from reality we advertising experts have gotten. These data represent the latest numbers I could find. I have listed the sources below. So here we go -- 10 facts, direct from the real world: E-commerce in 2014 accounted for 6.5 percent of total retail sales. 96% of video viewing is currently done on a television. 4% is done on a web device. In Europe and the US, people would not care if 92% of brands disappeared. The rate of engagement among a brand's fans with a Facebook post is 7 in 10,000. For Twitter it is 3 in 10,000. Fewer than one standard banner ad in a thousand is clicked on. Over half the display ads paid for by marketers are unviewable. Less than 1% of retail buying is done on a mobile device. Only 44% of traffic on the web is human. One bot-net can generate 1 billion fraudulent digital ad impressions a day. Half of all U.S online advertising - $10 billion a year - may be lost to fraud. As regular readers know, one of our favorite sayings around The Ad Contrarian Social Club is a quote from Noble Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman, who wonderfully declared that “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” I think these facts do a pretty good job of vindicating Feynman.

Andreasen wanted to know why these people had deviated from their usual patterns. What he discovered has become a pillar of modern marketing theory: People’s buying habits are more likely to change when they go through a major life event. When someone gets married, for example, they’re more likely to start buying a new type of coffee. When they move into a new house, they’re more apt to purchase a different kind of cereal. When they get divorced, there’s a higher chance they’ll start buying different brands of beer.7.7 Consumers going through major life events often don’t notice, or care, that their shopping patterns have shifted. However, retailers notice, and they care quite a bit.

One example of a high-tech company that submits to a Graham type of analysis is Amazon.com. Though it does business exclusively on the Web, Amazon is essentially a retailer, and it may be evaluated in the same way as Wal-Mart, Sears, and so forth. The question, as always, is, does the business provide an adequate margin of safety at a given market price. For much of Amazon’s short life, the stock was wildly overpriced. But when the dot-com bubble burst, its securities collapsed. Buffett himself bought Amazon’s deeply discounted bonds after the crash, when there was much fearful talk that Amazon was headed for bankruptcy. The bonds subsequently rose to par, and Buffett made a killing.

The creative imitator looks at products or services from the viewpoint of the customer. IBM’s personal computer is practically indistinguishable from the Apple in its technical features, but IBM from the beginning offered the customer programs and software. Apple maintained traditional computer distribution through specialty stores. IBM—in a radical break with its own traditions—developed all kinds of distribution channels, specialty stores, major retailers like Sears, Roebuck, its own retail stores, and so on. It made it easy for the consumer to buy and it made it easy for the consumer to use the product. These, rather than hardware features, were the “innovations” that gave IBM the personal computer market.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak.... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come.

personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company.

The first involves streamlining operations and introducing cost innovations from manufacturing to distribution. Can the product’s or service’s raw materials be replaced by unconventional, less expensive ones—such as switching from metal to plastic or shifting a call center from the UK to Bangalore? Can high-cost, low-value-added activities in your value chain be significantly eliminated, reduced, or outsourced? Can the physical location of your product or service be shifted from prime real estate locations to lower-cost locations, as The Home Depot, IKEA, and Walmart have done in retail or Southwest Airlines has done by shifting from major to secondary airports? Can you truncate the number of parts or steps used in production by shifting the way things are made, as Ford did by introducing the assembly line? Can you digitize activities to reduce costs? By

This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This

The fact that it is not a single individual or group of individuals who control or coordinate the innumerable economic activities in a market economy, does not mean that they occur randomly or in a chaotic way. Each consumer, producer, retailer, rental land owner, or worker conducts individual transactions with other individuals on pre-agreed terms. Prices convey these terms not only to the individuals directly involved in the transaction, but throughout the entire economic system, and indeed throughout the world. When someone somewhere else has a better product or a lower price for the same product or service, this is passed on and influences everyone's decisions, without the need for a public official or planning commission to issue orders to consumers. or producers. In fact, this happens faster than any bureaucrat takes to collect the information necessary to make their decisions.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates. I also was worried that we might lose the team concept, or fail to keep the family concept viable and realistic and meaningful to our folks as we grow. Those challenges are more real than somebody’s theory that we’re headed down the wrong path. As business leaders, we absolutely cannot afford to get all caught up in trying to meet the goals that some retail analyst or financial institution in New York sets for us on a ten-year plan spit out of a computer that somebody set to compound at such-and-such a rate. If we do that, we take our eye off the ball. But if we demonstrate in our sales and our earnings every day, every week, every quarter, that we’re doing our job in a sound way, we will get the growth we are entitled to, and the market will respect us in a way that we deserve.

As holders of money, labourers are free to buy as they please, and they have to be treated as consumers with autonomous tastes and preferences. We should not make light of this (Grundrisse, p. 283). Situations frequently arise in which labourers can and do exercise choice, and the manner in which they do so has important implications. And even if, as is usually the case, they are locked into buying only those commodities capitalists are prepared to sell, at prices capitalists dictate, the illusion of freedom of choice in the market plays a very important ideological role. It provides fertile soil for theories of consumer sovereignty as well as for that particular interpretation of poverty that puts the blame fairly and squarely upon the victim for failure to budget for survival properly. There are, in addition, abundant opportunities here for various secondary forms of exploitation (landlords, retail merchants, savings institutions), which may again divert attention from what Marx considered to be the central form of exploitation in production.

products.” The Global Positioning System (GPS) uses spread spectrum. So does the U.S. military’s $41 billion MILSATCOM satellite communications network. Wireless local area networks (wLANs) use spread spectrum, as do wireless cash registers, bar-code readers, restaurant menu pads, and home control systems. So does Qualcomm’s Omni-TRACS mobile information system for commercial trucking fleets. So do unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), electronic automotive subsystems, aerial and maritime mobile broadband, wireless access points, digital watermarking, and much more. A study done for Microsoft in 2009 estimated the minimum economic value of spread-spectrum Wi-Fi in homes and hospitals and RFID tags in clothing retail outlets in the U.S. as $16–$37 billion per year. These uses, the study notes, “only account for 15% of the total projected market for unlicensed [spectrum] chipsets in 2014, and therefore significantly underestimates the total value being generated in unlicensed usage over this time period.” A market of which 15 percent is $25 billion would be a $166 billion market.

Because so many people were betting against GameStop —and brick-and-mortar retail in general — the overall short position was enormous, almost comically so. At certain points over the past six months, it had bounced between 50 and even 100 percent of the overall float, meaning nearly all the shares of GameStop in existence had been borrowed and sold by short sellers, all of whom had an obligation to rebuy those shares at some point in the future. So, what if Keith was right, and the stock went up instead of down? It would be like watching investors trying to get out of a burning building, through a single, narrow door. The stock would rocket. As a financial educator, Keith knew that short selling could be one of the riskiest plays on the market. You really needed to be certain a stock was going down, because your upside was limited, but your losses could, theoretically, be infinite. The fact that so many competent investors were short selling GameStop could mean the stock really was a dog; but it also meant the stock was loaded with rocket fuel, and it wouldn't take much to ignite and sent it right to the moon.

People, especially those in charge, rarely invite you into their offices and give freely of their time. Instead, you have to do something unique, compelling, even funny or a bit daring, to earn it. Even if you happen to be an exceptionally well-rounded person who possesses all of the scrappy qualities discussed so far, it’s still important to be prepared, dig deep, do the prep work, and think on your feet. Harry Gordon Selfridge, who founded the London-based department store Selfridges, knew the value of doing his homework. Selfridge, an American from Chicago, traveled to London in 1906 with the hope of building his “dream store.” He did just that in 1909, and more than a century later, his stores continue to serve customers in London, Manchester, and Birmingham. Selfridges’ success and staying power is rooted in the scrappy efforts of Harry Selfridge himself, a creative marketer who exhibited “a revolutionary understanding of publicity and the theatre of retail,” as he is described on the Selfridges’ Web site. His department store was known for creating events to attract special clientele, engaging shoppers in a way other retailers had never done before, catering to the holidays, adapting to cultural trends, and changing with the times and political movements such as the suffragists. Selfridge was noted to have said, “People will sit up and take notice of you if you will sit up and take notice of what makes them sit up and take notice.” How do you get people to take notice? How do you stand out in a positive way in order to make things happen? The curiosity and imagination Selfridge employed to successfully build his retail stores can be just as valuable for you to embrace in your circumstances. Perhaps you have landed a meeting, interview, or a quick coffee date with a key decision maker at a company that has sparked your interest. To maximize the impression you’re going to make, you have to know your audience. That means you must respectfully learn what you can about the person, their industry, or the culture of their organization. In fact, it pays to become familiar not only with the person’s current position but also their background, philosophies, triumphs, failures, and major breakthroughs. With that information in hand, you are less likely to waste the precious time you have and more likely to engage in genuine and meaningful conversation.

THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.

By that time, Bezos and his executives had devoured and raptly discussed another book that would significantly affect the company’s strategy: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. Christensen wrote that great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements. Sears, for example, failed to move from department stores to discount retailing; IBM couldn’t shift from mainframe to minicomputers. The companies that solved the innovator’s dilemma, Christensen wrote, succeeded when they “set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and independent businesses around the disruptive technology.”9 Drawing lessons directly from the book, Bezos unshackled Kessel from Amazon’s traditional media organization. “Your job is to kill your own business,” he told him. “I want you to proceed as if your goal is to put everyone selling physical books out of a job.” Bezos underscored the urgency of the effort. He believed that if Amazon didn’t lead the world into the age of digital reading, then Apple or Google would. When Kessel asked Bezos what his deadline was on developing the company’s first piece of hardware, an electronic reading

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

It's not that we're dumb. On the contrary, many millions of people have exerted great intelligence and creativity in building the modern world. It's more that we're being swept into unknown and dangerous waters by accelerating economic growth. On just one single day of the days I have spent writing this book, as much world trade was carried out as in the whole of 1949; as much scientific research was published as in the whole of 1960; as many telephone calls were made as in all of 1983; as many e-mails were sent as in 1990.11 Our natural, human, and industrial systems, which evolve slowly, are struggling to adapt. Laws and institutions that we might expect to regulate these flows have not been able to keep up. A good example is what is inaccurately described as mindless sprawl in our physical environment. We deplore the relentless spread of low-density suburbs over millions of acres of formerly virgin land. We worry about its environmental impact, about the obesity in people that it fosters, and about the other social problems that come in its wake. But nobody seems to have designed urban sprawl, it just happens-or so it appears. On closer inspection, however, urban sprawl is not mindless at all. There is nothing inevitable about its development. Sprawl is the result of zoning laws designed by legislators, low-density buildings designed by developers, marketing strategies designed by ad agencies, tax breaks designed by economists, credit lines designed by banks, geomatics designed by retailers, data-mining software designed by hamburger chains, and automobiles designed by car designers. The interactions between all these systems and human behavior are complicated and hard to understand-but the policies themselves are not the result of chance. "Out of control" is an ideology, not a fact.

The fragility of the US economy had nearly destroyed him. It wasn't enough that Citadel's walls were as strong and impenetrable as the name implied; the economy itself needed to be just as solid. Over the next decade, he endeavored to place Citadel at the center of the equity markets, using his company's superiority in math and technology to tie trading to information flow. Citadel Securities, the trading and market-making division of his company, which he'd founded back in 2003, grew by leaps and bounds as he took advantage of his 'algorithmic'-driven abilities to read 'ahead of the market.' Because he could predict where trades were heading faster and better than anyone else, he could outcompete larger banks for trading volume, offering better rates while still capturing immense profits on the spreads between buys and sells. In 2005, the SEC had passed regulations that forced brokers to seek out middlemen like Citadel who could provide the most savings to their customers; in part because of this move by the SEC, Ken's outfit was able to grow into the most effective, and thus dominant, middleman for trading — and especially for retail traders, who were proliferating in tune to the numerous online brokerages sprouting up in the decade after 2008. Citadel Securities reached scale before the bigger banks even knew what had hit them; and once Citadel was at scale, it became impossible for anyone else to compete. Citadel's efficiency, and its ability to make billions off the minute spreads between bids and asks — multiplied by millions upon millions of trades — made companies like Robinhood, with its zero fees, possible. Citadel could profit by being the most efficient and cheapest market maker on the Street. Robinhood could profit by offering zero fees to its users. And the retail traders, on their couches and in their kitchens and in their dorm rooms, profited because they could now trade stocks with the same tools as their Wall Street counterparts.

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw On a cool fall evening in 2008, four students set out to revolutionize an industry. Buried in loans, they had lost and broken eyeglasses and were outraged at how much it cost to replace them. One of them had been wearing the same damaged pair for five years: He was using a paper clip to bind the frames together. Even after his prescription changed twice, he refused to pay for pricey new lenses. Luxottica, the 800-pound gorilla of the industry, controlled more than 80 percent of the eyewear market. To make glasses more affordable, the students would need to topple a giant. Having recently watched Zappos transform footwear by selling shoes online, they wondered if they could do the same with eyewear. When they casually mentioned their idea to friends, time and again they were blasted with scorching criticism. No one would ever buy glasses over the internet, their friends insisted. People had to try them on first. Sure, Zappos had pulled the concept off with shoes, but there was a reason it hadn’t happened with eyewear. “If this were a good idea,” they heard repeatedly, “someone would have done it already.” None of the students had a background in e-commerce and technology, let alone in retail, fashion, or apparel. Despite being told their idea was crazy, they walked away from lucrative job offers to start a company. They would sell eyeglasses that normally cost $500 in a store for $95 online, donating a pair to someone in the developing world with every purchase. The business depended on a functioning website. Without one, it would be impossible for customers to view or buy their products. After scrambling to pull a website together, they finally managed to get it online at 4 A.M. on the day before the launch in February 2010. They called the company Warby Parker, combining the names of two characters created by the novelist Jack Kerouac, who inspired them to break free from the shackles of social pressure and embark on their adventure. They admired his rebellious spirit, infusing it into their culture. And it paid off. The students expected to sell a pair or two of glasses per day. But when GQ called them “the Netflix of eyewear,” they hit their target for the entire first year in less than a month, selling out so fast that they had to put twenty thousand customers on a waiting list. It took them nine months to stock enough inventory to meet the demand. Fast forward to 2015, when Fast Company released a list of the world’s most innovative companies. Warby Parker didn’t just make the list—they came in first. The three previous winners were creative giants Google, Nike, and Apple, all with over fifty thousand employees. Warby Parker’s scrappy startup, a new kid on the block, had a staff of just five hundred. In the span of five years, the four friends built one of the most fashionable brands on the planet and donated over a million pairs of glasses to people in need. The company cleared $100 million in annual revenues and was valued at over $1 billion. Back in 2009, one of the founders pitched the company to me, offering me the chance to invest in Warby Parker. I declined. It was the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I needed to understand where I went wrong.

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First, the Internet has driven the cost of discovery for products and services lower than ever. Unlike in the past, when companies needed to offer goods in retail stores or broadcast advertising in order to be visible to customers, today buyers can find whatever they’re looking for on Amazon or other online marketplaces like Alibaba, in app stores, or, when all else fails, by Googling. Because products and services that are already popular will almost always come up first in search results, companies with a competitive advantage can quickly grow to the point where the increasing returns of network effects produce a winner-take-most or winner-take-all market.

As a retail day trader, you profit from volatility in the market. If the markets are flat, you are not going to make any money; only high frequency traders make money under these circumstances. Therefore, you need to find stocks that will make quick moves to the upside or to the downside in a relatively predictable manner.

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Behind every sale there is a smile.

Retailing is the art of making habits and the business of maintaining habits.

Retailing is the art of making habits and the business of maintaining habits.

Retaining (of customers and employees) wins retailing

Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books.

The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents. Exacerbating the trends caused by computers and robots are globalization and regionalization. As medium-skilled technical work is outsourced to workers in developing nations, many of those jobs are disappearing at home. Lower-skilled jobs, which often require face-to-face contact or social knowledge in the form of cultural or language abilities, are likely to remain. Higher-skilled work is also more resistant to shipping overseas because of the benefits of coordination with management and the market. Think of Apple’s tagline on all of its iPhones: “Designed in California. Made in China.” Design and management stay; manufacturing goes.

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Picture a countryside with one hundred million chickens roaming the land. It is challenging to imagine anything of that magnitude. It happens to be the number of cooked rotisserie chickens Costco sells annually. The Chief Financial Officer shared that the retailer loses upwards of US$40 million a year selling the chicken. This is not altruism. People are lured by the five-dollar item but leave with a cart overflowing with bulk underwear, photocopier paper, and lawn ornaments. This practice of selling rotisserie chicken has spread to most grocery chains in North America.

Network effects are a positive feedback loop: as more retailers attract a larger number of customers, additional retailers are drawn in. Network effects can cause markets to reach a tipping point: to spring from very low adoption to universal acceptance in no time at all. And the reverse is true as well. As fewer people use cash, the number of establishments that can make change drops and fewer stores are willing to accept cash. This situation gives customers an incentive to move to mobile payments.

This low-wage southern labor model is no longer contained to the geographic South nor to manufacturing. (For the past two decades, the biggest driver of retail markets in the United States has been southern-based Walmart, the country’s largest private employer by far. As Walmart expanded from Arkansas, it brought its fiercely low-wage and antiunion ethos with it—and local wages and benefits tumbled in its wake.) The wage difference between workers in the industrial Midwest and the South was nearly seven dollars an hour in 2008; three years later, wage cuts in the Midwest had slashed the regional difference in half.

Good content always adds value to the reader's life.

The world is already full of content, only the digital strategy gives it meaning

The only hero of your story is the customer, and you are the guide for a hero that is on the way to achieve fulfillment.

Instead of counting followers, focus on what the community can achieve through what you are doing.

I love seeing pop-up Ads as soon as I get up - said no one ever.

When you are writing content, remove everything that doesn't benefit customer.

The only hero of your story is a customer, and you are a guide for a hero that is on way to achieve fulfillment

Don't optimize for search engines, optimize for users

This low-wage southern labor model is no longer contained to the geographic South nor to manufacturing. (For the past two decades, the biggest driver of retail markets in the United States has been southern-based Walmart, the country’s largest private employer by far. As Walmart expanded from Arkansas, it brought its fiercely low-wage and antiunion ethos with it—and local wages and benefits tumbled in its wake.)

Futures Made Simple has been developed based on years of educating, coaching and working hands on with thousands of retail investors. Through our partnership with you, we provide all of the tools and support that you need, in order to confidently trade the worlds' biggest markets. Utilising the leverage these markets offer, rewards can be spectacular, and of course care needs to be taken with managing the risk, hence why we provide a huge depth of education.

What got less coverage was that, adjusted for inflation, egg prices were actually lower in 2022 than they had been in 2015. Prices peaked in December 2022, with a dozen eggs selling for around $5 on average. Egg supply and prices were already recovering in early 2023. Producer prices, the prices farmers charge grocery stores, began to fall. The retail price, the price consumers pay in the grocery store, fell sharply (by $1 in one week in early January!) and continued to fall into 2023. The moral of the story is: We need more egg-laying chickens. The eggflation story is emblematic of what could happen to the rest of the economy. We are dependent on fragile systems that can break when stressed.

Just as you pay a commission to the retail broker who took your order or provides you trading access via an electronic platform, the market maker must be paid in the form of the bid/ask spread. Think about it: If as a retail trader you are always paying the ask and selling the bid, you are a net loser even if the price of the futures contract remains unchanged.

In Trading, Every Setback is a Setup for a Comeback.

The food industry is a complex, global network of diverse businesses that supplies most of the food consumed by the world's population. The industry has evolved to become highly diversified, with manufacturing ranging from small, traditional, family-run activities to large, capital-intensive and highly mechanized industrial processes . Food production and sale involve various stages, including agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, marketing, wholesale and food distribution, foodservice, grocery, farmers' markets, public markets, and other retailing. Additionally, there are areas of research such as food grading, food preservation, food rheology, food storage that deal with the quality and maintenance of quality

Department stores in particular had difficulty surviving the onslaught of low-price competitors. Their inability to adapt to changing consumer tastes and the emergence of new retail channels that targeted specific market segments—the so-called category killers in hardware, toys, and furniture—deeply eroded their market share. While in the 1960s and 1970s most clothing was sold in full-service department stores, by 1990 such stores accounted for only 29 percent of sales.

By the time I bought Pronto Markets, it might have taken only a slightly bigger trailer, mostly to accommodate the cribs for the two kids we now had. We did find the money, somehow. Rexall was willing to take back paper. (Dart was in a hurry to wind up his retailing affairs. This was a big advantage for me, because if I walked away, he’d be left with a crumb of a bastard business.) We had $4,000 from Alice’s savings from her teaching school before she had the kids (we lived on my $325) and we sold our little house in which we had an equity of $7,000. I borrowed $2,000 from my grandmother and $5,000 from my father. (Pop, an engineer, spent most of his career being alternately employed and dis-employed by General Dynamics depending on the vagaries of the aerospace business; in between he owned a series of small businesses. I think he even had a Mac Tool route in 1962.)

What we gave mostly was wine. Especially after we made this legal(!) by acquiring that Master Wine Grower’s license in 1973. Most requests were made by women (not men) who had been drafted by their respective organizations to somehow get wine for an event. We made a specialty of giving them a warm welcome from the first call. All we wanted was the organization’s 501c3 number, and from which store they wanted to pick it up. We wanted to make that woman, and her friends, our customers. But we didn’t want credit in the program, as we knew the word would get out from that oh-so-grateful woman who had probably been turned down by six markets before she called us. Everybody wanted champagne. We firmly refused to donate it, because the federal excise tax on sparkling wine is so great compared with the tax on still wine. To relieve pressure on our managers, we finally centralized giving into the office. When I left Trader Joe’s, Pat St. John had set up a special Macintosh file just to handle the three hundred organizations to which we would donate in the course of a year. I charged all this to advertising. That’s what it was, and it was advertising of the most productive sort. Giving Space on Shopping Bags One of the most productive ways into the hearts of nonprofits was to print their programs on our shopping bags. Thus, each year, we printed the upcoming season for the Los Angeles Opera Co., or an upcoming exhibition at the Huntington Library, or the season for the San Diego Symphony, etc. Just printing this advertising material won us the support of all the members of the organization, and often made the season or the event a success. Our biggest problem was rationing the space on the shopping bags. All we wanted was camera-ready copy from the opera, symphony, museum, etc. This was a very effective way to build the core customers of Trader Joe’s. We even localized the bags, customizing them for the San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco market areas. Several years after I left, Trader Joe’s abandoned the practice because it was just too complicated to administer after they expanded into Arizona, Washington, etc., and they no longer had my wife, Alice, running interference with the music and arts groups. This left an opportunity for small retailers in local areas, and I strongly recommended it to them. In 1994, while running the troubled Petrini’s Markets in San Francisco, I tried the same thing, again with success, for the San Francisco Ballet and a couple of museums.

The Most Important Strategic Decision Was to Become a Genuine Retailer The fundamental job of a retailer is to buy goods whole, cut them into pieces, and sell the pieces to the ultimate consumers. This is the most important mental construct I can impart to those of you who want to enter retailing. Most “retailers” have no idea of the formal meaning of the word. Time and again I had to remind myself just what my role in society was supposed to be. Many of the policy decisions for a retailer boil down to this: How closely should we stick to the fundamental retailing job? “Retail” comes from a medieval French verb, retailer, which means “to cut into pieces.” “Tailor” comes from the same verb. The fact is that most so-called retailers don’t want to face up to their basic job. In Pronto Markets we did everything we could to avoid retailing. We tried to shift the burden to suppliers, buying prepackaged goods, hopefully pre-price-marked (potato chips, bread, cupcakes, magazines, paperback books) so we had no role in the pricing decision. The goods were ordered, displayed, and returned by outside salespeople. To this day, supermarkets fight with the retail clerks’ union to expand their right to let core store work be done by outsiders. Whole Earth Harry’s moves into wine and health foods had taken us quite a distance into genuine retailing. In our cheese departments we were literally taking whole wheels and cutting them into pieces. I took this as an analogy for what we should do with everything we sold. Getting rid of all outside salespeople was corollary to the programs that would unfold during the next five years. In Mac the Knife, no outsiders of any sort were permitted in the store. All the work was done by employees. The closest thing to it that I see these days is Costco, which shares many features with Trader Joe’s.

Product: •What is the product? •Who is it for? •What does it do? •How does it work? •How do people buy and use it? Benefits: •How does the product help people? •What are its most important benefits? Reader: •Who are you writing for? •How do they live? •What do they want? •What do they feel? •What do they know about the product, or this type of product? •Are they using a similar product already? Aim: •What do you want the reader to do, think or feel as a result of reading this copy? •What situation will they be in when they read it? Format: •Where will the copy be used? (Sales letter, web page, YouTube video, etc) •How long does it need to be? (500 words, 10 pages, 30 seconds, etc) •How should it be structured? (Main title, subtitles, sidebars, pullout quotes, calls to action, etc) •What other types of content might be involved? (Images, diagrams, video, music, etc) Tone: •Should the copy be serious, light-hearted, emotional, energetic, laid-back, etc? Constraints: •Maximum or minimum length •Anything that must be included or left out •Legal issues (regulations on scientific or health claims, prohibited words, trademarks, etc) •How this copy needs to fit in with other copy that’s already been written, or that will be written in the future •Whether the copy will form part of a campaign, so that different ideas along the same lines will be needed in future (see ‘Take it further’ in chapter 9) •Which countries the copy will appear in (whether in English, or translated) •SEO issues (for example, popular search terms that should feature in headings) •Brand or tone of voice guidelines (see ‘Tone of voice guidelines’ in chapter 15) Other background information about: •The product (development history, use cases, technical specifications, distribution, retail, buying processes, buying channels, marketing strategy) •The product’s market position (price point, offers and discounts, customer perceptions, competitors) •The target market (size, history, typical customer profile, marketing personas) •The client (history, current setup, culture, people, values) •The brand (history, positioning, values) Project management points: •Timescales (dates for copy plan, drafts, feedback, final copy, approval) •Who will provide feedback, and how •Who will approve the final copy, and how •How the copy will be delivered (usually a Word document, but not always) These are only suggestions.

Association Rule Mining: Also called Market Basket Analysis when used in retail industry, these techniques look for associations between data values. An analysis of items frequently found together in a market basket can help cross-sell products, and also create product bundles.

Six key themes The real reset has gone much deeper and encompasses six key themes, all of which are linked: 1) The shift from a push system, based on producer dominance, oligopolistic competition, limited supply and restricted access, to a pull system driven by consumer dominance, near-perfect competition, perfect knowledge and ubiquitous access to goods. 2) The change from mass marketing, based on a few research and segmentation studies, to personalized marketing, based on individual customer data. 3) The realization that the e-commerce revolution and the communications revolution (social media, user reviews, influencers, etc.) has broken the traditional supply chain, with its multiple players – manufacturers, branded wholesalers and retailers – all supping from the margin cup and adding their mark-ups to prices, and replaced it with a shorter and more direct route to market. 5) The realization that the stores channel was not the only, or even best, way of moving goods from factories to consumers. Indeed, that it was inferior to the e-commerce channel in many respects as a pure goods-transmission mechanism. 6) That putting the consumer at the heart of the business model required seeing the different channels as the consumer saw them – not competing, but complementary to each other. 7) That based on this, the traditional model of the store, as a ‘warehouse’ piled high with stock and with just a narrow fringe of branding and customer service on top, was obsolete and that only a ruthless attention to the remaining added value of physical stores could ensure their continued relevance and survival.

That trifecta—humanities, technology, business—is what has made him one of our era’s most successful and influential innovators. Like Steve Jobs, Bezos has transformed multiple industries. Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer, has changed how we shop and what we expect of shipping and deliveries. More than half of US households are members of Amazon Prime, and Amazon delivered ten billion packages in 2018, which is two billion more than the number of people on this planet. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides cloud computing services and applications that enable start-ups and established companies to easily create new products and services, just as the iPhone App Store opened whole new pathways for business. Amazon’s Echo has created a new market for smart home speakers, and Amazon Studios is making hit TV shows and movies. Amazon is also poised to disrupt the health and pharmacy industries. At first its purchase of the Whole Foods Market chain was confounding, until it became apparent that the move could be a brilliant way to tie together the strands of a new Bezos business model, which involves retailing, online ordering, and superfast delivery, combined with physical outposts. Bezos is also building a private space company with the long-term goal of moving heavy industry to space, and he has become the owner of the Washington Post.

In the “distribution upheaval” of the early 1960s, hundreds of merchants were put out of business by the looming discount behemoths. By the late 1970s, discounting had infiltrated every market segment, and the emergence of “category killers” in hardware, toys, and furniture had killed off more than half of existing retail chains. Millions of jobs were shipped overseas as discounters leaped at every opportunity to buy from foreign suppliers. Prices crashed, consumer debt soared, and Americans put their futures on the installment plan.

One enterprising U.S. brokerage firm, Interactive Brokers, announced that, unlike its competitors, it did not sell retail stock market orders to high-frequency traders, and even installed a button that enabled investors to route their orders directly to IEX, the stock market created by Brad Katsuyama and his team, who would protect them.

My mother holds these markers all over town; people who owe her a favour. It might be a peek into planning documents, or preferential treatment at an up-coming retail sale, or even a private viewing of a property before it hits the market.

The remaining forty percent of startups, also replicative by nature, are unaffiliated retail businesses that sell everything from auto repairs to zippers. The merchant–entrepreneurs who start these enterprises see a market for something new, or a better way to promote and sell already existing goods.

Nikhil Sharma (nikhil.pro) is an experienced Meta Ads, Google Ads & Email Marketer Freelancer. Has scaled multiple Shopify stores and consulted over 50+ Shopify South American brands including the Biggest Furniture Retail of New York.