Who are you competing with?
“I want to be as famous as Persil Automatic.” -- Victoria Beckham
I picked up this nugget from Paul Arden.
As a teenager, he informs his readers that Victoria Beckham’s ambition was not just to be better than her mates or even a famous singer but to become a world brand.
“She not only dreamed about it but wanted it enough to go about getting it. That in itself makes her different from most of us.
"It’s not how good she was that mattered; it’s how good she wanted to be.
"What is interesting in her quote is that she didn’t compare herself with George Michael or Mariah Carey; rather, she saw the fame of Persil Automatic as her yardstick.”
She wasn’t competing with musicians, pop stars, dancers, and entertainers.
Her competition was finding a way to be a part of the end user’s everyday life.
You see, Persil Automatic is a laundry detergent.
A highly useful product. One that solves problems. Something that is top of mind for the consumer.
Such an original imagination powered her success.
Tucker Max speaking with James Altucher on a pod, reminded listeners that TV networks used to only compete with other TV networks.
Now they compete with every single person online.
CNN Worldwide boss Jeff Zucker competes with Twitter for breaking news.
Stephen B. Burke of Comcast competes with my cousin for entertainment.
The NFL competes with the Call of Duty World League for viewers and for players.
Bloomberg News, staffed by 2,300 editors and reporters in 72 countries, competes with Matt Drudge staffed by an internet connection in one city.
There’s more content being made today than ever before.
There’s more competition than ever before.
It’s just that I am not competing with you.
We are moving into a business environment where going small, going local, going tribal is happening again.
A business environment where you can be small-scale and matter.
A business environment where you can be small-scale and prosper from the benefits of mass-scale production and administration.
The days of mass are gone.
Today it is all about niche is rich.
You can be Porsche, or you can be Toyota.
You can be Southern Seasons, or you can be Publix.
Frankly, tiny is where humans work and operate better.
It’s a business environment where our customers keep us top of mind and automatic.
-Marc
WHAT BRIGADOON IS WATCHING THIS WEEKEND
Only one in six payments in the UK is made in cash now, down from over half a decade ago.
Geothermal: Global geothermal power capacity was north of 14 gigawatts at the end of last year, up 40 percent over the past decade. There’s increasing demand for the form of electrical generation from places in Indonesia and eastern Africa, and lots of the companies that design and install utility-scale geothermal are Japanese: Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Toshiba Energy Systems, and Toyota Tsusho are huge players in the geothermal space, with Japanese corporations holding over a 60 percent share in geothermal turbines.
How Japan’s big bet on hydrogen could revolutionize the energy market: The country’s effort to be carbon-free by 2050 relies on a fuel source many see as too expensive and unrealistic.
WSJ
+ General Motors Co. and Wabtec Corp. have signed a nonbinding agreement to build locomotive engines using the automaker’s Ultium electric battery and its Hydrotec hydrogen fuel-cell system
+ Hydrogen fuel cell Land Rover Defender in the works
Thinner mints: Girl Scouts have millions of unsold cookies: AP reports the Girl Scouts have an unusual problem this year: 15 million boxes of unsold cookies. The 109-year-old organization says the coronavirus — not thinner demand for Thin Mints — is the main culprit. As the pandemic wore into the spring selling season, many troops nixed their traditional cookie booths for safety reasons.
The bottlenecks which could constrain emission cuts: The green revolution risks running short of minerals, money, and places to build.
Economist
+ Two-thirds of humankind now lives in countries where wind and solar power offer the cheapest new electrical-generating capacity
+ Annual clean-energy investment, already at an all-time high, would have to exceed $4trn by 2030, three times its average over the past five years. And the market for key minerals needed to build clean-energy kit would expand nearly seven-fold
YouGov: By what age do you think you will have saved enough to retire comfortably, should you want to?
+ 18% think they'll have enough saved before they turn 60
+ 13% think they'll have enough saved when they are 65
+ 9% think they'll be older than 70 by the time they have enough saved to retire
+ 14% of Americans say they don't think they will ever be able to retire
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Thanks for supporting Brigadoon. See you next week.
-Marc
Curation + commentary by Marc A. Ross | Founder + Chief Curator @ Brigadoon
Brigadoon is Global Street Smarts
More @ thebrigadoon.com
