The [Broken] Circle of LIfe

Future Commerce Podcast: eCommerce, DTC and Retail Strategy

Jeff Bezos Steps Down & Starting Small

• When Tim Cook took over at Apple, nobody knew who Tim Cook was and now he’s a household name. Andy Jassy will experience the same.
• Jeff Bezos started small with Amazon—by selling books. Marc Lore started small with Diapers.com—by selling a diaper. Now he’s building “a city of the future.” We have a new Insiders piece about this.
• Lean Luxe put out an email recently that mentioned Monocle’s “Digital Decency Manifesto” which was a better take of our Late Stage Retail where we toyed with the idea of a ‘consumer’s Bill of Rights.” This article also mentioned an Air Mail article about self documentaries.
• These “Me-Documentaries” started small—with Facebook and documenting our lives in a deeper way. Brian finds this both narcissistic and compelling: “I expect that we’re all headed towards having our own documentaries at some point.”
• StoryCorps has created kiosks to dive into stories with family members. Someone created a tech service that sends prompts to someone in order to compile a book that helps them to tell their story.

Post-Truth Society

• This documenting of life can lead to narcissism, but it could also lead to untruth—for example, making an AI chat bot from communications with a lost loved one to be able to cope with their loss.
• “Effectively, you can memorialize someone in such a way that even death itself can be post-truth.” - Phillip Jackson
• In our new report, Vision 2021, we discuss some of these topics of post-truth: digital dysmorphia, the selfie industrial complex, and other trends in the future of consumerism.

GameStop, the New Occupy Wall Street, and the Dark Before the Dawn

• Linking back to our Vision report, GameStop became a brand as performance art. “It wasn’t the brands themselves that were doing it, but they became the performance art because we made them so.” - Brian Lange
• This feeds into our new culture of cynicism where we’re not actually reckoning with real issues and problems. What happened with GameStop stocks, AMC stocks, and others is a cynical rebellion.
• People often fret over automation and technical innovation posing a threat in the job market, but we’re watching this take place digitally during this pandemic. A lot of retail is being consolidated into more powerful hands. GameStop, for example, is a retailer of products that are now increasingly going digital and subscription-based.
• This is all leading to a consolidation, an oligarchy/oligopoly of brands, which we talk about in our “Changing of the Guard” Insiders piece.
• On a positive note: in times of adversity, real innovation happens. The next Amazon, Google, Apple, is being born during this time. All of the tools needed are easily available for this to happen.

Links

• Check out Insiders #071: “The Changing of the Guard Signals a Coming Post-Innovation Age”
• Check out Lean Luxe’s newsletter and it’s mention of Monocle’s “Digital Decency Manifesto” and Air Mail’s article: “Me-Documentaries are the New Status Symbol.”
• Check out our new report, Vision 2021, and sign up for our newsletter to be the first to be notified of new reports!

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