I recently purchased a Fitbit watch, and I fell in love with it. I now spend more time tracking my heart rate and sleep patterns and finding ways to “improve” my scores. Maybe I am a fitness nerd, but I find all this data and fancy reports addicting. But why did I buy this watch in the first place? In my last two articles, I talked about how politics and inflation affect business and Ecommerce strategies. Today, I want to discuss the impact of societal factors and give a few examples of opportunities they have created over the last few years.
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At the beginning of 2022, we all realized how crazy inflation is. It hit me hard when I saw the price of my favorite brisket sandwiches increase by $1.50. Everything becomes so much more expensive : our favorite foods, plane tickets, housing, gas, etc. Many of us changed our shopping habits in response to the high inflation rates (I still buy the brisket sandwiches but sadly travel less often). Businesses had to adapt to maintain their profitability but also to keep customers interested. Let’s see how inflation impacts ecommerce and businesses in general.
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The French presidential election took place a few weeks ago, and I am glad it is over. I was getting bored of hearing the same things all day, every day, in the media – although it is always an interesting time. Hearing the candidates and politicians or reading about global politics always gets me thinking: What is the impact on businesses?
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We have all experienced this. Sales that previously looked great start to decrease month after month. Is it because of lower customer demand? Or is it due to issues with distributors? Perhaps there is something about the competitors’ landscape we did not notice? Seeing a new competitor enter your market is never a great experience, but realizing they offer similar products and services at a shockingly-low price is especially scary. But what should a company do after the initial panic?
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The difference between penny-pinching and true low-cost strategies
Happy New Year to my readers! I know it’s been a while; I took a short break from writing during the holidays (and after getting a bad case of Covid), but I am excited to be back with more content.
Over the last few weeks of 2021, I wrote about economies of scale and discussed ways for businesses to improve their bottom line. Of course, every company wants to lower their costs to either improve their profits, pass savings onto their customers to gain market share, or for other reasons. But some companies are going further and excel at reducing costs: these are the successful adopters of low-cost strategies.
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In the last few years, “brand awareness” became one of the most popular buzzwords in the digital marketing world. Every week, I receive marketing emails from digital consulting agencies telling me how they can help me “build brand awareness” or “increase brand awareness”. That sounds great on paper, and I think brand awareness can be a positive thing. However, what I’m seeing is that the necessity of building brand awareness has become overblown, especially for small niche businesses on a limited marketing budget. I wish I had time to ask these marketing agencies what they mean exactly by “increasing brand awareness”, and I suspect some of them are preying on businesses with limited knowledge of marketing strategy.
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In the last article, we looked at how small businesses can take advantage of commercial, technical, and marketing economies of scale. But there are two more types of economies of scale that I’d like to talk about: network and managerial. Let’s see what small businesses can do to exploit these.
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As you probably already know, economies of scale are cost reductions that occur when companies increase production. When you open an economics textbook and you read about it, you might find examples about company XYZ ordering 1 million units from their supplier instead of 100,000. I remember being a college student and learning about these economics concepts; it did not feel much different than learning about trigonometry in middle school: “When am I going to use this outside the classroom?” was my immediate thought.
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Earlier this year, I was talking to a student who told me she was considering starting a side online business to generate extra income, and she told me about some challenges she was facing. One of them was about graphic design, our conversation basically went like this:
- “The thing is, I’m not good enough at graphic design.”
- “You don’t have to do it yourself. Do you know anyone who can help you?”
- “I don’t think so.”
- “Well, why don’t you hire a graphic designer?”
- “I don’t think I can afford it. This must be expensive, right?”
And that is when I told her about marketplaces for freelance services.
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If you have ever studied business, you’ve probably heard of this concept called Product Life Cycle(and if not, you’ll definitely hear about it again soon). It represents the phases that a product goes through from its birth to its death.
Continue readingAbout This Blog
My name is François, I’m the author of this blog. I love writing and talking about business and ecommerce. I hope you enjoy my work, feel free to contact me for any suggestion!