Raffi's Round Up - w/c 7th April 2024
The five best Marketing-related nuggets across my desk this week
Welcome to the latest edition of my weekly Round Up!
Greetings from London at maximum apricity! Here are the five best Marketing-related nuggets that came across my desk this week:
ONE (if you want to see an under-discussed part of the tariff story, read this one)
One of my first thoughts after seeing the news out of the US was something like": “this is going to be great for depop, Vinted, etc”
Seems like I’m not the only one with that thought… Especially when you add the cost of living consideration; a 2024 Recommerce Report from Offerup found that 35% of shoppers embarked on their first resale journey in the past year; an 8% year-over-year increase.
The full piece on Axios is worth a read.
TWO (if you want to learn the earned secrets of growing a SMB, read this one)
4 Years Of Lessons From Running My Own Bookstore is the kind of headline I’m here for.
I particularly like:
“Have more than one way to win. This was a great piece of advice I got from Allison Hill, who owns Vroman’s and Book Soup in Los Angeles: most bookstores only survive if they’re multipurpose spaces. The Painted Porch isn’t just a bookstore—it’s my office, my employees’ office, the place where we record podcasts and film YouTube videos. So if nobody comes in and buys books, we’re not necessarily losing money. At the same time, it probably also wouldn’t have made sense to build out this level of podcast studio or even a writing office by itself either. So multi-use allows you to do more than you ordinarily would—across the board.”
One of the truths I am subscribed to in the marketing world is the idea of 70:20:10. It’s unpacked in detail here (by yours truly!) but in essence it’s all about diversifying your sources of opportunity.
Go check the full bookstore piece here.
THREE (if you want to get the lowdown on the future of media, watch this one)
Doug Shapiro breaks down four mega-trends:
Stagnation of time spent, which puts a cap on real growth;
Fragmentation of attention, due both to an explosion of content supply and a changing consumer definition of quality (which is shifting away from high production values);
Disintermediation of traditional intermediaries as technology systematically makes it easier for creatives and creators to reach consumers directly;
Concentration of power in a handful of platforms and attention in a few megahits, owing to the amplifying effect of positive feedback loops on the internet.
The full presentation is worth a watch, if you have a spare 24 minutes:
FOUR (if you’re similarly invested in what Arsenal’s win and Reddit have to do with one another, read this one)
Originally shared on my LinkedIn
Like many (all?) Arsenal fans Tuesday night I spent the wee hours scrolling through endless amounts of content and looking up the dates for the semi finals.
I went down a rabbit hole of trying to discover whether our semi final first leg (without tempting fate) was going to be at home or away...***
Where was the only place to find the answer?
Google ❌
ChatGPT ❌
Perplexity ❌
YouTube ❌
Reddit ✅
For sure, a lot of search is moving away from Google.. but it's not as plain and simple as "it's all going to AI!!"...
Reddit has ~400m Weekly Active Users (roughly the same as ChatGPT) and it's growing at 47% YoY... That dislocated Google share is going to be split between multiple players
*** If you want to know the semi final order, they're here.
FIVE (if you want to understand haptic nostalgia, dive into this one)
More on BlueSky here.