BREW LEGENDS
Coffee History, Brands, Gadgets, Places, and more.
The Company That Never Picked Up The Phone
Every enterprise software company is built on the same article of faith: that nothing worth real money gets bought, it only ever gets sold. Hence the account executives, the quota carriers, the regional vice presidents of regional vice presidents, the steak dinners booked against a deal that will close in the quarter after next. Two graduates of the University of New South Wales looked at that structure, decided it was a cost rather than a...
The Meter, Not The Mission Statement
The conference version of the Microsoft recovery is a story about feelings. A new chief executive arrives in February 2014, hands out a book about mindset, stops the infighting, and a trillion dollars of market value grows back out of the improved atmosphere. It is a lovely story and it gets the standing ovation every time. It is also not what happened. What happened was that Microsoft changed how it billed, and everything else followed the...
The Shelves Were Never The Problem
The story everyone tells is the easy one. A big-box toy retailer with aisles the length of airstrips got eaten by a website, the way video stores got eaten and bookshops got eaten, and if you want a moral it is that the internet is merciless. It is a tidy narrative and it has the advantage of letting nobody in particular be responsible. It is also mostly wrong about the mechanism. Toys R Us did not die of Amazon. It died of a balance sheet, and...
The Pattern Was Never The Problem
Burberry's revival is usually told as a taste story. A tired British coat company with an unfortunate check problem hires better designers, shoots better campaigns, puts the pattern back where it belongs, and reclaims its place among the luxury houses. It is a flattering account of the fashion industry's own importance. The actual work was done by people counting things in warehouses and reading contracts written decades earlier. The company's...
Eighteen Months Before The Towel
The Old Spice turnaround is the most over-taught case study in modern marketing, and almost every version of it begins in the wrong place. It begins with a man on a boat, and it ends with a conclusion so convenient that an entire industry adopted it as doctrine: that a dying brand can be resurrected by brilliant creative work and a lot of views. "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" launched in February 2010 through Wieden+Kennedy, won the Film...