No Substitutions

The post where I talk about walls and Mexico without mentioning you-know-who Earlier this month, my girlfriend I visited San Miguel de Allende in the central highlands of Mexico. The AirBNB we stayed in north of the city centre was lovely, but I will admit some trepidation walking around the neighbourhood it was in. Many…

Do Brands Matter? Name Two Elevator Brands

The death of brands? NYU professor and author Scott Galloway sees several trends that threaten consumer brands. Walmart and Amazon are in a never-ending struggle to lower prices, which means squeezing suppliers’ profits to the point where they can no longer afford the advertising needed to build a brand. Google search volumes for non-branded search…

Amazon’s Turbulent Beginnings

Amazon is a dominant player now, but its birth was plagued with doubt and financial weakness, reveals the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone. Amazon started as an online book seller, and this was a canny move by Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder.  Books were true commodities – all the same, no question of whether…

Amazon and Amazon Web Services

In 2016, Amazon.com made more money from AWS, Amazon Web Services than from retail sales. Jeff Bezos approved the idea of experimenting with Amazon infrastructure in 2004, but AWS only became commercially available in 2006. In many ways, AWS is a refinement of the infrastructure that Amazon built for its own operations. Principle 6 –…