Thinks 1331

Dan Williams: “In ordinary social life (and in the small-scale societies that characterise almost all of human evolution), humans can typically check what people tell them against reality. That is, although our species has always depended on communication and social trust, we can often test people’s trustworthiness. If Harry tells me that Sally is dull, and I learn firsthand that she is exciting and interesting, I will decrease my trust in Harry…Nothing like this is true in democratic politics. We can rarely directly verify the information we acquire from others. We can cross-check it against the competing testimony of others, but we cannot directly verify that testimony either…Given the existence of complexity, invisibility, ignorance, and politically motivated cognition, it seems unlikely that citizens—the ultimate locus of decision-making within such societies—will form responsible, rational, accurate beliefs about reality. And without such beliefs—without informed public opinion—it is difficult to see how open societies can make good collective decisions.” [via Arnold Kling]

Ajay Shah: “The Indian average tariff needs to get down to the 1 or 2 per cent value seen in Southeast Asian countries, which have gained from the third globalisation, such as Vietnam. Many non-tariff protectionist measures need to be reversed. It is better to solve disabilities of operating in India (for example, the working of goods and services tax or the capital controls) than to pay out production-linked incentives.”

WSJ: “It is possible to cultivate patience—the ability to regulate your emotions in the face of delays, frustration, adversity and suffering. The first step is learning to view waiting as a positive activity rather than something to avoid at all costs. “Waiting has come to imply suffering or a failure to adopt the appropriate technology,” says Sarah Schnitker, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University. A better way to look at patience, says Schnitker, who leads the school’s Science of Virtues Lab, is “the sweet spot where you feel calm but still engaged in pursuing the important things in life.” Waiting may feel painful at first, particularly for people predisposed to seeking control. But almost anyone can learn to strengthen their ability to wait. It all starts with pausing and identifying or noticing your impatience, says Schnitker. Then you can try to think about your situation in a new way. For instance, if you’re annoyed that you have to spend a lot of time training a new colleague, reframe the task as a chance to strengthen your prowess as a leader.”

FT: “Electricity generated from solar power is expected to surpass that of wind and nuclear by 2028, according to the International Energy Agency. The picture underlines the quandary confronting governments that have pledged to decarbonise their economies, but will find doing so harder unless the historic shift from fossil fuels is both affordable for the public and creates new jobs. Governments face a “delicate and difficult balancing act”, said Michael Parr, director of trade group Ultra Low Carbon Solar Alliance. They must “maximise renewables deployment and carbon reductions, bolster domestic manufacturing sectors, keep energy prices low and ensure energy security”.”

Retention Re-engineering: Random to Recurring Revenues (Part 7)

Rethink

Marketing indeed needs a fundamental rethink. The industry’s disproportionate focus on acquisition has led to a significant shift in profits from brands to adtech companies. This imbalance has created a cycle where marketers are constantly chasing new customers at the expense of nurturing and growing relationships with existing ones. Meanwhile, martech software providers have largely stagnated in their innovation, primarily focusing on incremental improvements to existing technologies such as CDPs, segmentation tools, and personalisation engines.

While these technologies have their place, they haven’t delivered the transformative impact on customer retention and lifetime value that many marketers hoped for. The lack of significant breakthroughs has left many brands struggling to differentiate themselves and truly engage their customers in meaningful ways.

Generative AI, while promising, has thus far been primarily utilised for content creation, barely scratching the surface of its potential to revolutionise marketing strategies and customer interactions. Similarly, communication channels have remained largely static, with only minor evolutions such as the adoption of WhatsApp in certain markets.

This stagnation calls for a paradigm shift in how we approach marketing. Instead of merely adapting existing marketing concepts, we need to “re-engineer” our approach, drawing inspiration from engineering principles of innovation, efficiency, and scalability.

The five innovations I mentioned (Co-Marketer, Digital Twins, Large Customer Models, Epps and ActionAds, and Bundled Kaizen Services) represent a shift from traditional marketing thinking to an engineering-inspired approach. They focus on solving fundamental challenges in customer retention and engagement through technological innovation and data-driven strategies. By leveraging these technologies, marketers can move beyond the limitations of current martech solutions and create truly transformative customer experiences.

  • Co-Marketer: Engineers a data-driven decision-making system using Agentic AI, precisely predicting and responding to customer needs
  • Digital Twins: Constructs virtual models of customers for real-time behaviour simulation, enabling dynamic strategy optimisation
  • Large Customer Models: Architects comprehensive data integration systems, facilitating proactive customer relationship management
  • Epps (Email Apps) and Action Ads: Reimagines transform passive communication channels as interactive, revenue-generating platforms that enable direct customer engagement and action
  • Bundled Kaizen Services: Implements continuous improvement processes, ensuring ongoing optimization of retention technologies and strategies.

This re-engineering of retention marketing isn’t just about adopting new technologies; it’s about fundamentally changing how we think about customer relationships. It’s about building systems that can anticipate customer needs, create personalised experiences at scale, and continuously adapt to changing behaviours and preferences. By embracing this engineering mindset, marketers can shift from a reactive, acquisition-focused approach to a proactive, retention-driven strategy that maximizes customer lifetime value and drives sustainable business growth.

In essence, this new approach to retention marketing combines the creativity and customer-centric thinking of traditional marketing with the systematic, data-driven approach of engineering. It’s about building a marketing ecosystem that’s not just efficient at acquiring customers, but excels at retaining and growing customer relationships over time. This is the future of marketing – not just as a set of tactics, but as a comprehensive, engineered system for creating and maintaining customer value.

Thinks 1330

NYTimes: “Time is money. That age-old aphorism is particularly true on TikTok, where holding onto viewers for even a single second longer can translate into greater algorithmic reach and, thus, higher earning potential. It makes sense, then, that a content style has emerged that favors epic sagas broken down into shorter clips. If Homer were a TikTok influencer, Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops would cut just before our hero blinds the monster. For that, you’d have to watch the next video. And the next, and the next. Creators have perfected the craft of offering just enough plot to keep viewers hooked and scrolling to find out what happens next.”

Milton and Rose Friedman: “The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights, subject only to the proviso that he not interfere with the freedom of other individuals to do the same. This implies a belief in the equality of men in one sense; in their inequality in another. Each man has an equal right to freedom. This is an important and fundamental right precisely because men are different, because one man will want to do different things with his freedom than another, and in the process can contribute more than another to the general culture of the society in which many men live.” [via CafeHayek]

Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson: “We need a new democratic social contract that people can believe in, which is most likely to come from the Democratic Party. Such a proposal must start with a commitment to more pro-worker policies. It must involve a believable manifesto that moves away from the party’s ties with global business, including the tech sector, and a clear, workable plan of how economic growth and low inequality can be combined. It must include a commitment to close the cultural chasm that has opened between the Democratic Party and many working-class Americans. These are among the root causes of our discontent, and they must be addressed. If Americans fail to rise to the challenge, history has plenty of examples that ought to alarm us.”

NYTimes: “Data is the main ingredient in today’s generative A.I. systems, which are fed billions of examples of text, images and videos. Much of that data is scraped from public websites by researchers and compiled in large data sets, which can be downloaded and freely used, or supplemented with data from other sources. Learning from that data is what allows generative A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to write, code and generate images and videos. The more high-quality data is fed into these models, the better their outputs generally are. For years, A.I. developers were able to gather data fairly easily. But the generative A.I. boom of the past few years has led to tensions with the owners of that data — many of whom have misgivings about being used as A.I. training fodder, or at least want to be paid for it.”

Retention Re-engineering: Random to Recurring Revenues (Part 6)

Rebalancing

Retention marketing budgets have lagged acquisition spends. Here are possible reasons (as provided by Claude and ChatGPT):

  1. Immediate Impact and Short-term Focus: Acquisition campaigns often show immediate results in terms of new customer numbers and sales, providing quick wins for marketers. The direct correlation between spending and short-term revenue growth makes it easier to justify and allocate larger budgets to these campaigns. This short-term mindset often leads to neglecting long-term strategies like customer retention.
  2. Quantifiable Metrics and ROI Measurement: Acquisition metrics like Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and return on ad spend (ROAS) are straightforward and easy to measure, making it simpler to demonstrate ROI. Retention marketing, on the other hand, involves more complex metrics such as customer lifetime value (LTV), churn rate, and engagement, which can be harder to quantify and attribute directly to specific marketing efforts. This difficulty in measuring retention ROI makes it challenging for marketers to justify increased spending on retention.
  3. Pressure for Growth and Stakeholder Expectations: Companies, especially startups and those backed by venture capital, are under constant pressure to demonstrate rapid growth. New customer acquisition is often seen as the quickest path to achieving this, leading to a disproportionate focus on acquisition at the expense of retention. Investors and stakeholders often prioritise rapid growth and market share expansion, pushing companies to focus on acquisition rather than retention.
  4. Organisational Structure and Perception: In many organisations, acquisition and retention efforts are managed by separate teams with distinct goals and budgets. This siloed approach can lead to a lack of coordination and an imbalance in budget allocation, with acquisition teams often having more resources and influence. Additionally, many organisations view retention as a customer service or product responsibility rather than a core marketing function, leading to underinvestment in retention-focused marketing initiatives.
  5. Lack of Innovation in Retention Channels: While digital advertising and acquisition technologies have evolved rapidly, retention marketing tools and channels have lagged. This lack of innovation makes it harder to create compelling retention campaigns that can compete with the excitement and perceived effectiveness of acquisition efforts. Historically, there have been more established tools, platforms, and strategies for customer acquisition compared to retention.

So, what can be done to change the situation and rebalance acquisition and retention? (These are suggestions from Claude and ChatGPT.)

  1. Shift Focus to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Educate stakeholders on the importance of CLV and how it impacts long-term profitability. Emphasise how increasing LTV through effective retention strategies can lead to more sustainable and profitable growth. Highlight case studies and data that demonstrate the long-term benefits of a balanced approach.
  2. Integrate Acquisition and Retention Efforts: Break down silos between acquisition and retention teams to create a more holistic marketing strategy. By integrating efforts, companies can ensure a more balanced allocation of resources and a seamless customer journey from acquisition to retention. This integration can help balance budgets between acquisition and retention.
  3. Leverage Advanced Analytics, AI, and Retention-focused Technologies: Invest in advanced analytics, AI-driven technologies, and retention-specific tools to better understand customer behaviour, predict churn, and personalize retention efforts. These tools can provide actionable insights and demonstrate the effectiveness of retention strategies, making it easier to justify increased budgets. Develop more sophisticated metrics and attribution models for retention efforts, including predictive analytics to forecast the impact of retention initiatives on future revenue.
  4. Develop Innovative Retention Campaigns and Strategies: Innovate in retention marketing by leveraging new technologies and channels, such as personalized email marketing, loyalty programs, and interactive content. Create compelling retention campaigns that engage customers and build long-term relationships. Implement advanced segmentation and personalization techniques to create highly targeted retention campaigns.
  5. Align Incentives and Create Retention-focused KPIs: Align marketing and sales incentives with retention goals. Encourage teams to focus not only on acquiring new customers but also on keeping them engaged and satisfied. Establish key performance indicators specifically for retention, and tie them to overall business objectives. This can help elevate the importance of retention efforts and naturally lead to more focus and investment in retention strategies.
  6. Demonstrate Cost-effectiveness and Showcase Success: Highlight how retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Showcase case studies and success stories where retention efforts have significantly impacted business outcomes, helping to build internal support for increased retention focus.
  7. Develop a Customer-centric Culture: Foster a company-wide culture that prioritizes customer satisfaction and long-term relationships. This can naturally lead to more focus and investment in retention strategies.

Thinks 1329

HT: “India’s urbanisation needs to be centred on 4E outcomes — Economic growth and job creation; Equitable access to services and opportunities; Environmental sustainability; and democratic Engagement. Balancing these 4Es in the larger cities calls for metropolitan governance that can overcome spatial and functional fragmentation through single-point political accountability. Failure to do so will have real implications in terms of loss of economic productivity and potentially even gradual decay, worsening congestion and air pollution, and exacerbating climate effects like flooding. The government of India must, therefore, assume active leadership in evolving a model of metropolitan governance for the country.”

Mint: “GenAI is not just about chatbots: The transformer method is ushering the world into a broader machine era. This is not just about the arrival of chatbots and copilots, but about a fundamental shift in our relationship with technology. There will be missteps, mal-investments and market bubbles aplenty, but we need a genuine understanding—as against historical pattern fitting—at every level to benefit from these trends. For nations, communities, families and corporates, GenAI is likely to consume decision-making more than almost anything else in the coming decades, with the gains disproportionately favouring those acting appropriately and early. Of course, this comes with all sorts of concerns, from the environmental footprint of building large global brains to the ethical implications of humanoid robots. In other words, we are in an era of hyperchange, which may make the era of change between the early 90s and mid-2000s look like a mere trailer.”

McKinsey 2024 tech trends outlook. Among them: Applied AI, Industrializing machine learning, and Next-generation software development.

John Mackey, cofounder and former CEO of Whole Foods: “I regret the circumstances that made selling to Amazon the very best option. If I had to go back in the same circumstances, though, we’d make the same decision. Our shareholder activists told us, “We’re going to take over your board, fire your management team, and sell the company to the highest bidder.” I thought we could resist. That was one of the paths not taken. But we needed time to turn our business around. We needed to lower our prices, and that was going to be painful. The other option we had was to go private, but that would have taken us billions and billions of dollars in debt. I woke up one morning and I thought, “I wonder if Amazon would be interested?” And I got super excited because I admired Amazon. I admired Jeff Bezos. We had a tremendously good connection. So, we contacted Amazon to see if they’d be interested. They were very excited about it. It happened pretty quickly. Six weeks after our very first meeting, we signed an agreement to merge. But I always wonder if we’d fought, could we have stayed independent? At the time, my job was to look for the win–win–win solution for the stakeholders, including the investors. This [ended up being] a good thing for our customers. We lowered prices four times in the first two years. It was good for our team members. They all got a raise. It was good for our suppliers because we continued to do business with them. Amazon.com picked up many of our suppliers. It was good for our shareholders because they got about a 40% price increase. So, it was truly a win–win–win.”

Retention Re-engineering: Random to Recurring Revenues (Part 5)

Recap

I asked Claude and ChatGPT to provide a history of retention marketing. Here is the merged summary.

Retention marketing, the practice of focusing on keeping existing customers rather than solely acquiring new ones, has evolved significantly over the past century, particularly in the B2C (Business-to-Consumer) and D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) sectors. Its history is marked by the interplay of technological advancements, evolving consumer behaviors, and the increasing importance of customer lifetime value (LTV).

Early Beginnings: Personal Relationships and Mail-Order Catalogs

The concept of customer retention can be traced back to the early 20th century when local businesses relied heavily on personal relationships and reputation to maintain their customer base. Shopkeepers knew their customers by name, remembered their preferences, and offered personalized service – the earliest form of retention marketing. This era was characterized by manual efforts and direct interactions, with small businesses thriving on customer loyalty fostered through personalized service and community ties.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the advent of mail-order catalogs, marking the first significant shift in retention marketing. This innovation allowed businesses to maintain relationships with customers over long distances, expanding their reach beyond local communities.

The Rise of Mass Marketing and Loyalty Programs

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the rise of mass marketing and consumerism, driven by television, radio, and print advertising. While these channels were effective for customer acquisition, they offered limited tools for personalized retention efforts. The focus shifted towards reaching larger audiences, but some companies began to recognize the value of customer loyalty.

A significant milestone in structured retention marketing came in 1981 when American Airlines launched the first modern frequent flyer program, AAdvantage. This marked the beginning of a new era in customer loyalty initiatives. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, loyalty programs proliferated across various industries. Supermarkets introduced loyalty cards, and credit card companies offered rewards points. These programs aimed to incentivize repeat purchases and gather customer data, providing a blueprint for other sectors and emphasizing the value of repeat customers.

The Digital Revolution: E-commerce and CRM

The late 1990s brought the dot-com boom and the rise of e-commerce, transforming how businesses interacted with customers. This digital revolution provided online retailers with access to vast amounts of customer data, enabling more sophisticated retention strategies. Amazon, founded in 1994, quickly became a pioneer in online personalization and recommendation engines, setting new standards for customer retention in the digital age.

The 2000s saw the emergence of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, allowing businesses to track and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. This technology enabled more sophisticated retention strategies, including targeted email marketing and personalized offers. Email marketing emerged as a powerful tool, allowing businesses to send targeted messages to their customer base. Early adopters of email marketing saw impressive results, highlighting the potential of digital retention strategies.

Social Media and Customer Engagement

The rise of social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s opened new channels for customer engagement and retention. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram provided businesses with new avenues to engage with customers in real-time, address concerns publicly, and build communities around their products or services. Companies began to leverage user-generated content and social proof, encouraging customers to become brand advocates. This era saw retention marketing evolve from purely transactional efforts to building emotional connections with customers.

The Era of Big Data and Analytics

The 2010s marked the era of big data and analytics. Companies could now process vast amounts of customer data to predict behavior, personalize experiences, and prevent churn. Netflix’s recommendation algorithm and Spotify’s personalized playlists exemplify this data-driven approach to retention. The emergence of marketing technology (martech) platforms offered comprehensive solutions for customer relationship management, data analytics, and automation. These tools enabled businesses to segment their customer base, track behavior, and deliver highly personalized experiences.

Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) became essential, integrating data from various touchpoints to provide a unified view of each customer. The late 2010s and early 2020s saw the rise of CDPs and AI-driven marketing automation. These technologies allowed for even more sophisticated personalization and predictive modeling, enabling brands to anticipate customer needs and tailor their retention efforts accordingly.

The D2C Revolution and Mobile-First Strategies

The D2C boom in the mid-2010s brought retention marketing to the forefront for many digitally native brands. Companies like Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Glossier built their business models around cultivating long-term customer relationships, often through subscription-based services. These D2C brands focused heavily on retention marketing, using subscription models, personalized email campaigns, and loyalty programs to maintain customer engagement and drive repeat purchases.

Mobile apps became crucial retention tools, with push notifications and in-app messaging allowing brands to stay connected with customers. Loyalty programs evolved into mobile-first experiences, like Starbucks’ highly successful rewards app. The concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) became central to retention strategies, guiding marketing investments and efforts.

The Impact of COVID-19 and Future Trends

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated the shift towards digital commerce and highlighted the importance of customer retention. With acquisition costs rising and consumer behavior changing rapidly, many B2C and D2C businesses doubled down on retention strategies.

Today, retention marketing is more critical than ever. The integration of AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics is pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in customer retention. Concepts like hyper-personalization, omnichannel experiences, and predictive customer service are becoming standard practice for leading B2C and D2C brands.

The future of retention marketing lies in the further integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning. These technologies offer unprecedented capabilities for predicting customer behavior, personalizing interactions, and automating engagement. Innovations such as chatbots, personalized product recommendations, and dynamic content are becoming standard practices.

As we look to the future, the focus on retention marketing is likely to intensify. With increasing competition and rising customer acquisition costs, the ability to retain and grow the value of existing customers will be a key differentiator for successful B2C and D2C businesses. Companies must continually adapt their retention efforts, leveraging the latest technologies to build lasting customer relationships and ensure sustained growth in an increasingly competitive digital landscape.

Thinks 1328

WSJ: “Chief information officers say that for some of their most common AI use cases, which often involve narrow, repetitive tasks like classifying documents, smaller and midsize models simply make more sense. And because they use less computing power, smaller models can cost less to run. The shift comes as companies slowly move to deploy more AI use cases, while they are also under pressure to manage costs and returns on the pricey technology. “A giant LLM [large language model] that’s been trained on the entire World Wide Web can be massive overkill,” said Robert Blumofe, chief technology officer at cybersecurity, content delivery and cloud computing company Akamai. For enterprise use cases, he said, “You don’t need an AI model that knows the entire cast of ‘The Godfather,’ knows every movie that’s ever been made, knows every TV show that’s ever been made.””

Epigram on main page of WSJ’s Editorial Board: “We speak for free markets and free people, the principles, if you will, marked in the watershed year of 1776 by Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations.” So over the past century and into the next, the Journal stands for free trade and sound money; against confiscatory taxation and the ukases of kings and other collectivists; and for individual autonomy against dictators, bullies and even the tempers of momentary majorities.” [via CafeHayek]

NYTimes: “I left the bustle of Petitgrain Boulangerie in Santa Monica, Calif., with a plain croissant still hot from the oven, and though I tried to let it cool, I couldn’t. The outside shattered into so many fine, crisp, delicate layers across a tender, bubbled honeycomb — delicious, with the softest trace of yeast and a bronzed, malty sweetness. As it collapsed between my teeth, it puffed warm, butter-scented air that made it feel like I wasn’t just eating this croissant, but breathing it in.Fingers shining with fat, jeans covered in crumbs, I started to imagine, just for a second, what it would look like if I rearranged my life and moved to this side of town, in walking distance to this bakery. It felt so good to be reminded that in the competitive and often absurd era of extreme croissants, a plain one could have this effect.”

FT: “India’s brokerages, bourses and government may be enjoying swelling fee income and tax revenues from this rapid expansion, but the country’s capital market watchdog has repeatedly sounded warnings over retail losses as the notional value of index options trades more than doubled in the past financial year to $907tn, according to exchange operator NSE. Cheap access to options, whose leverage facilitates high exposure for modest outlay but magnifies the risk of losses, has resulted in what Ashish Gupta, chief investment officer at Mumbai-headquartered Axis Mutual Fund, calls the “gamification” of the stock market. “In India, there’s no other form of legalised gambling,” Gupta says. His research found that active traders in the country shot up to 4mn last year from less than half a million before the pandemic. Most are below the age of 40 and hail largely from India’s smaller cities.”

Retention Re-engineering: Random to Recurring Revenues (Part 4)

Review – 3

Exchange4Media: “Retention marketing leverages the foundation of trust and satisfaction built with current customers. By focusing on existing relationships, brands optimise their marketing efforts, tailoring their messages and offers to those who are already familiar with and fond of their brand. According to marketers, this approach is not just cost-effective but also deeply impactful, as satisfied customers often turn into brand advocates, furthering the reach and credibility of the brand organically…The buzz around retention marketing isn’t solely due to the rising costs of customer acquisition—there’s more to its appeal. Beyond just a reactive measure to economic pressures, retention marketing represents a proactive strategy with substantial rewards. As brands are struggling with the high stakes of acquiring new customers, the potential of retention marketing to generate higher returns with lower investment is becoming increasingly evident.”

Deepak Singh writes on LinkedIn that Retention is widely regarded as the hardest metric to move for product managers. To master retention, it’s crucial to go beyond theoretical understanding and examine in-depth case studies. His suggestions: Duolingo successfully utilized leaderboards, streaks, and notifications to boost retention, Google Play and Pinduoduo leveraged gaming and gamification, Amazon Prime’s loyalty program has had great success, and Spotify’s focus on playlists significantly improved retention and monetisation.

From one of my essays (Extreme Retention = Profit-centric Marketing) a few years ago: “B2C/D2C Businesses are hurting with rising CAC, increasing discounts, attention recession and data poverty. All these are driving them to keep spending increasingly larger parts of their marketing budgets on adtech (new acquisition). Half of the money being spent on adtech is being wasted (“AdWaste”) because of reacquisition (of inactive customers) and wrong acquisition (of customers who churn quickly). The focus on adtech has resulted in many profit killers. These spends and the focus on growth-at-all-costs is hurting profitability. What businesses need is a framework for profit-centric marketing, with profit creators. This can only come from existing customers – combining retention, repetition, referrals, reactivation (as opposed to reacquisition) and replenishment (targeted new acquisition). This 5R focus needs the 4P framework: pipes, partitioning, properties, and prospecting…Existing martech platforms tend to be focused more on features than on outcomes. They do not factor in the power law of marketing: 20% customers generate 60% of revenue and deliver 200% of profits. What marketers need to do is to therefore go beyond retention (of all) to extreme retention (of few)…In short: better experiences for better customers.”

From another of my essays (Hotline: The Crux of the Brand-Customer Relationship): “Building the hotline with existing customers is the only way brands can get their attention and solve for data. It is one of two ways to bring customers back to the properties (app and website) – the second method being big spends on branding. The hotline is the trick marketers have missed in the two other obsessions – new customer acquisition and adding bells and whistles to the app and website.”

Thinks 1327

Raghuram Rajan: “In many countries, the political landscape is changing dramatically, possibly auguring more radical policies in both the United States and Europe. Faced with societal ageing, de-globalization, climate change, anti-immigration sentiment and technological advances, central banks will feel pressure from many different directions in the coming years. One obvious concern is fiscal policy and debt. When radical politicians come to power, they rarely have austerity in mind. Most arrive with big audacious plans requiring massive increases in spending. (Argentinian President Javier Milei is an exception, in part because he was elected to reverse the policies of previous radicals). But moderate leaders also will feel greater pressure to spend in the years ahead. Real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates are likely to return to their long-term trend, which means debt-service costs will eat up more of governments’ budgets.”

Nitin Desai: “The crucial issue is the rate at which [India] can generate decent jobs in industry and services to absorb the rising number of working-age persons seeking jobs and the surplus labour shifting out of agriculture.  Projecting the official working age population (age 15-59) forecasts up to 2047 and assuming that the proportion of this group seeking work will remain at around 65 per cent, we will have about 120 million new job-seekers. A more problematic forecast is the scale of assessment of the shift of surplus labour out of agriculture. If we aim for a developed or even high-income country status then the share of agriculture has to come down to at most 10 per cent, and that means a shift of about 150 million people out of agriculture. Thus, this adds up to the creation of 270 million new jobs in industry and services to absorb the increase in employment-seeking population and the shift of surplus labour out of agriculture. This amounts to more than 10 million new industry and services jobs per year over the next 25 years.”

Neal Stephenson defines “metaverse” in 2024: “A massively multiplayer online universe that has a sense of space to it so that there are experiences distributed around that space in a way that is perceived by all of its users in the same way. And you can move around from one place to another and interact with other users who are not physically present. It’s not controlled by any one entity; many creators, large and small, build things there.”

FT: “India’s move to rein in foreign tech mirrors global trends in many ways. Like Europe’s Digital Markets Act, India’s digital competition bill would allow authorities to pre-emptively crack down on companies before they form monopolies — rather than punishing or breaking them up after the fact. But at its heart, India’s approach stands out for what Udbhav Tiwari, director of global product policy at Mozilla, calls an attempt to create a “fourth path” for regulating the internet. It seeks to be lighter touch than Europe and take consumer protection more seriously than the US. But it also creates broad powers for the state to police online speech in ways critics say resembles neighbouring China more than fellow democracies.”