When is the last time you received a Starbucks gift card? I’ve received them as holiday gifts, and I’ve given them to sales reps as thank you gifts. Starbucks gift cards, like their shops, are ubiquitous. They are almost as popular as gift cards from our nemesis: Amazon.com. Just about every month, a company offers me an Amazon gift card if I sign up for a service. WBGO, the local, Newark-based, non-profit radio station known for jazz, recently offered me an Amazon gift ...
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Whenever I visit my 76-year-old mom in Myrtle Beach, SC, she picks me up and the oldies station is playing in her car. I’ve tried changing that dial, and one has a better chance of outmaneuvering tennis star Daniil Medvedev. I imagine the oldies music brings her back to her youth. I read a study that people’s favorite song is often when they were 17 years old. That’s right: the 'best songs’ may not be the best songs but rather simply be what you heard in ...
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I don’t own a car, yet I have a strange desire to read Dan Neil's car column each weekend in The Wall St. Journal. Why would someone who doesn’t own a car, won’t be buying one soon, and hasn’t owned one in 25 years read a car column? It's a mix of enjoying the design and technology of automobiles, wanting to know what Dwayne Johnson may be buying next, loving Dan’s witty writing style, and, confession, simply being 13-years old at heart. Cars are ...
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George Lois, the adverting icon, wrote Damn Good Advice for those in the advertising field. In one section, he encourages us to highlight a truth. This may even include an assumption about a perceived weakness. Following George Lois' advice, I came up with these two pieces of ad copy for Bridge:
We’re smaller than Shopify. And that’s why you get more with us.
Shopify watches its stock price. We watch our customers' needs.
In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, a motivational speaker played by Alec Baldwin addresses a group of salesmen. He writes three letters vertically on the chalkboard, “A B C.” He explains that the acronym means "Always Be Closing."
The way that Baldwin's character thinks about sales, I may think about reading. I think of: "ABR,” Always Be Reading. Whether it's breakfast, lunch, or dinner, I try to get in a page or two of the Times, Wall St. ...
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Amazon issued a press release stating that it is fighting with 10,000 Facebook groups that sell fake Amazon reviews. It’s ironic, since Amazon has been a chief promoter of the avenue allowing this behavior: Section 230. Section 230 allows tech platforms to host and indirectly promote just about any type of bad behavior, including illegal behavior (fake review services and yes, human trafficking, murder-for-hire, etc.) and then say it’s just a community space and belatedly remove the ...
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This past week, Amazon announced it was adding Grubhub delivery to its Prime subscription (Read the news about Amazon and Grubhub here). The goal of Amazon Prime (and other subscription services) is to make the subscription so pervasive that it's sticky. Don’t like Prime movies? Ok, but you love free Grubhub delivery. If you don’t need feature X and want to cancel, you realize you still need feature Y and keep paying for the subscription.
The EU has passed a law that will affect Amazon and other big tech companies. The law will likely make it harder for Amazon to promote its own private label products on its website at the expense of others.
While this is welcome news to many, this is a small victory as Amazon’s ambitions are grand as well as its ability to outpace laws. For the first 25 years of the Internet, Amazon, founded in 1994, rode on the rails of the government being too slow to enforce online tax ...
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In the movie Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon, who plays a handsome MIT janitor moonlighting as a math savant (can one say, “Hollywood career vehicle”?), woos a young lady (played by the actress Minnie Driver) by outmaneuvering a few competing, obnoxious cads. When Damon’s character gets the girl's telephone number, he proudly shows it to the other guys and boasts, with his South Boston access, “How 'bout ‘dem apples?” I imagine Tim Cook imitating this...
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When you think of the Fourth of July, a few things probably come to mind: fireworks, hot dogs, and American flag fashion statements being among them. Who could blame you? July 4th is one of the most festive holidays of the year. The weather is warm, calendars are full of fun events, and everyone seems to be in a sunny state of mind—and for good reason. We have a lot to celebrate.
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My friend works at the Swiss running shoemaker ON. She recently texted me and suggested I try their running shoes. Three weeks later, I was handling two boxes of their Swiss engineered shoes. On one ON shoe, there is a little Swiss flag and the words “Swiss Engineering” printed. When I get a pair of Nike’s, they don’t say "Beaverton-engineering" or "US-engineering." Nor do Adidas shoes proclaim “German engineering.” ...
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The Brick report helps our company track our past and current progress. Our team can easily look back at the last 78 weeks and know what we did. (Most companies would be hard pressed to do this easily.) The Brick brings us together and keeps us on the same (web)page. Its success leads to me ask: “Could we have an approach that helps us look at our future?" I’ve sometimes thought about crafting a weekly 'Horizon Report' that would share what’s next for us.
We’ve chatted about the importance of checklists. Checklists can be checklists literally as well as figuratively (i.e. software). Checklists help us order our thoughts and actions. Yet, the last step on each checklist should be: removing as many checklist steps as possible. This ironic strategy is necessary because steps inherently are friction, and friction is our enemy. We want to help our clients avoid the drag of clicks and thinking.
We All Do!
A word popped into my head this morning as I was driving to the office.
“Polite company.” Hmmm, now that is a thought that can take many twists and turns.
The social interaction that goes with the meal is more important than the plates .But we love it when the environment and the conversation dovetale into a memorable enjoyable gathering.
To have a company or business characterized by courtesy is one way to think of it, but that is not what we are talking ...
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Today’s WSJ article made me think:
1. We need to reserve a ticker symbol for Bridge, like BRDG.
2. Meta should use the ticker DATA or THEFT, as that’s the business they’re in. They are in the business of using your personal data—whether via Facebook or in the metaverse, often without us being aware. To see a web page on Facebook or Instagram often requires logging in. Don’t want to log in? Too bad, that’s the only way to see the content. ...
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In the past, we’ve used spin classes and gyms as inspiration for Bridge. We see them as metaphors for helping retail business owners. The founders of SoulCycle, Elizabeth Cutler and Julie Rice, must have been eavesdropping on us: they are expanding their spinning approach to another sphere. The Times reports they have started Peoplehood, a business that seeks to help people via self-help (group-help?) sessions. It’s SoulCycle for the soul&...
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The weather is finally warming up so let's think outdoors entertaining and brighten your table with primary colors like our ALTEA yellow sunflower.
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While eating a slice of coal-fired pizza at Arturo’s in Soho yesterday, and getting an occasional whiff of Houston Street garbage, I had to admit: I was at a loss for insight to share with my coworkers this week. Each week, I send out a motivational message to my team that precedes a summary of what they accomplished. We call this report the Brick report. This would be my seventy-second Brick introduction: What else could I say--and would they miss it if there was not an introduction...
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In a 2007 article in The New Yorker, Atul Gawande, a surgeon and an author, advocatedthat more hospitals use checklists. He cited many medical studies showing how checklists save lives (and money). Implementing one checklist, a hospital "…prevented forty-three infections and eight deaths, and saved two million dollars in costs." The startling part: the list was only five steps long! In other words, people don’t consistently follow...
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