Here’s an interesting fact for your next dinner party:* In the US, private label accounts for 25% of total grocery spend. Whereas in the UK it's 44%, Spain 46%, and 45% in The Netherlands.
There’s a whiff of store-brand-scented opportunity there. And as Walmart rolls out a packaging update to its Great Value brand, you’d think they’d be inclined to agree.
However, Mark Ritson has argued that Walmart isn’t going far enough. If they really want to turn Great Value into a strategic asset, they need to invest in marketing, product and brand architecture.
*Disclaimer: The author accepts no responsibility for the number of people left wanting to talk to you by the end of the evening.
Is AI coming for us, our jobs and our little dogs too?
By Alex Imas’s reckoning, AI will commoditise lots of things, so exclusivity and status will shift to human-intensive, provenance-rich offerings instead. Meaning spending and employment will follow. This is what Alex calls the “relational sector”, where value is inseparable from the humans providing it:
“Some [relational sector jobs] already exist and are growing: nurses, therapists, teachers, boutique fitness instructors [...] Many haven’t been invented yet, just as six out of ten jobs people hold today didn’t exist in 1940 [...] You don’t need to be Picasso. You need to be the person whose involvement makes the product feel like it was made for someone, by someone. The economics of structural change tells us that when technology makes one type of production cheap, the economy doesn’t collapse. It transforms. It shifts toward the things that technology can’t make cheap.”
Pew Research Center has been prodding around in teen social media experiences and how and why they use each of the big 3. One of many interesting findings:
“TikTok users are more likely to report that it negatively impacts their sleep [...] Roughly four-in-ten say it hurts the amount of sleep they get, compared with about a quarter of those who say the same for Snapchat or Instagram. And larger shares of TikTok users also say it hurts their productivity, compared with the other two platforms. Snapchat stands out for teens saying it helps their friendships. Just under half (44%) report this – higher than the shares on Instagram or TikTok who say the same.”
The MIT Press published a great piece on the making of Apollo spacesuits. The International Latex Corporation, which won the contract, never quite matched NASA's bureaucratic culture. And that might just be why the suits worked:
“Even as ILC’s most dedicated managers would later admit, the forest of paperwork thrown around the suit’s craftsmanship was, essentially, “a bit of a smokescreen,” hiding a hand-crafted nature [...] ILC’s process was so dependent on the individual craftsmanship of its employees that attempts to precisely enumerate the procedures used were inherently impossible. As a seamstress later reflected, “No two people sew alike.” While even a change of a 16th of an inch in a formalized sewing procedure had to be debated and recorded on a systems engineering “configuration board,” the procedures documented in paperwork were never precisely the ones used to assemble the suits.”
This organ made out of Furbys will haunt my dreams for ever more. As it happens, LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER will be representing the UK at Eurovision later this month… What could go wrong 😁
The Apple Macintosh Selling Guide from 1984. Pretty wild to think that your smartphone is more powerful than 10,000 of those original Macintoshes combined.
How the heck does GPS work? More ways to make yourself the life and soul of the party 😉
Bon weekend,
Fran