This week’s podcast is about personalization and never-ending customer improvements. This is a key operating activity. And sometimes it is a digital marathon that can create an operating advantage.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to the Tech Tour.

Here are the 4 steps to start personalizing.

• Step 1 is DOB3 (Digital Core) and DOB 6 (people, culture, teams). Do organizational change.
• Step 2 is to identify 3-4 Use Cases:
  • These will impact different functions differently.
• Step 3 is to have an ROI within 6 months.
• Step 4 is to get the process to 5-7 days.

Here are the 6 types of customers (from BCG).

1. Brand advocates
2. Multicategory
3. Single-category regulars
4. Deal seekers
5. Disengaged
6. Lapsed

Here are the 4 level of extreme personalization and customer improvements.

Level 1 – Run a Personalization Marathon

Level 2 – Build a Repeat and Retain Machine.

• Also move beyond just sales transactions. Do experience management.

Level 3 – Surround Customers with Ever-Increasing Value. Add complementary services. Bundles. Consumption ecosystems.

• Including AI services. This is where the Rate of Learning Marathon really matters. Watch for machine learning operating flywheels.

Level 4 – Build a Moat

This looks like this:

Here are the 5 Sales Points mentioned (McKinsey)

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—–transcript below

Episode 227 – Personalization.1

Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from TechMoat Consulting. And the topic for today, why every business must run the Personalization Marathon. Now, for those of you who have been following for a while I’ve written kind of a lot of books and a lot of content about moats and marathons and digital strategy and how you win.

But really, when you boil it up, there’s a couple things that matter much more than the others. For the most part, not always, but often. One is building a moat. And the other is choosing which marathon to run. And within that, personalization, never ending customer improvements, continually improving the customer experience, which can include services, [00:01:00] experiences, sales, marketing, a lot of things.

It tends to be the biggest lever. Like, when you don’t know what to do as a digital business, like, just run the personalization marathon and build a moat. That’s, you know, that’s about as good a simple playbook as you can come up with. So, I want to start talking a lot a bit more about personalization and how you do that in practice.

Now, I’m using the word personalization because it’s, it’s commonly used. I think it’s actually, you know, it’s not what I usually refer to it as. I usually say digital operating basics number two, which is never ending customer improvements. You have to continually improve the customer experience and within that personalization is a great place to focus, but it’s not the only one.

So, I’m kind of mixing those things together. When I say personalization, it’s broader than that, but let’s focus on that. Cause that’s usually where people start. So, in this podcast, I’m going to [00:02:00] sort of go through the basics of how you get started and this journey of personalization of never-ending customer improvements.

It never ends. It goes on forever. And the key, if you can pull it off. is it’s a marathon. So, the further you pull ahead of your competitors, the better you’re going to get. Because often, not always, there can be a feedback loop where you provide something that’s better as an experience. More customers use it.

The customers you do have use it more frequently. That gets you more data. And you start to do more and more machine learning and make it better. So, you can get somewhat of a feedback loop there sometimes. It’s not a network effect, which people say it is, but there can be an additive cumulative effect where the better you get at this versus your competitor’s, you know, the stronger you become at it.

And I’ll break that down in detail. But there can be an operating flywheel there especially if it’s based on machine learning and proprietary user [00:03:00] data. Anyways, I’ll get into all that. Don’t worry about it. Okay, so that’s going to be the topic for today. Now I did sort of take a week off. I was in Dubai I’ll talk about that in another podcast.

I’m going to write about it. Going to the Beauty World conference there. Pretty cool subject. E commerce related to beauty, skincare. It’s really fantastic. I pay a lot of attention to it. So, I’ll talk about that. I was in Dubai doing conference stuff, so I took the week off, but I’ll catch up this week.

Anyways, that’s going to be the topic for today, standard disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information for me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky.

This is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Okay, the two concepts for today to keep in mind are DOB2, Digital Operating Basics Number 2, which is never ending [00:04:00] customer improvements, including personalization. So, kind of what I just said. It’s an operating activity.

One of the reasons it’s kind of a complicated operating activity is it cuts across a lot of traditional business divisions. If you’re going to continually personalize, well, you got to deal with sales and marketing. You got to deal with content creation, emails customer service, chatbots what services you offer what the page of each individual customer looks like when they log in, what, you know, what content might be shown, what products might be shown.

You know, if you log into Netflix, you’re going to see a different Netflix than others. So, it can play out across lots of different platforms. traditional business divisions. So, when you do projects like this at companies to do personalization, you generally have to create sort of a new office that reports to the CEO or cross functional team.

It’s a little bit tricky to get it going, but [00:05:00] that all goes under DOB 2. So that’s a concept we’ve talked about before. And then the other one is Okay, what happens, you know, my books are all called moats and marathons. Moats are a structural advantage. You have a plane, I have a car, your machine is just faster than mine.

It’s a structural thing. That’s a moat. A marathon is more about an operating activity. Look, we’re both doing the same operating activities, but you’re just doing it better and faster, and over time, you are the one that ran ahead of me in the marathon pack, and you sort of slowly Pull ahead and eventually pull so far ahead.

It effectively becomes a real good advantage. Even though it’s not structural, which is what we call moat, this operating advantage, you know, you can pull so far ahead as a marathon runner. You basically have a real Sizable [00:06:00] operating advantage. Elon Musk can build rockets that others can’t build. Is there a structural advantage?

No. His team has just been doing this every year for decades and they’re so far ahead in the marathon that it, you know, you can’t really match what they do. Well, personalization can become the same thing. You can get so good at this that you pull ahead of everyone. Now, at that point, DOB2, Never Ending Customer Improvements, can become a marathon.

And the one I put it to in my list is Rate of Learning and Improvement and Adaptation. That’s the basically The L in SMILE, S M I L E. Well, L stands for Rate of Learning, Intelligence, and Adaptation. Now, that was not something we talked about a lot previously, because you couldn’t really do, you couldn’t get that much better than others.

You know, everyone had the same [00:07:00] products in their stores. Everyone had the same cable news, or Cable Package. As digital has become more powerful, our ability to customize and make continual improvements that can be individualized has gotten better. Well, that just became a much bigger deal because it turns out machine learning is really powerful, and you can get more and more advantages in this area, and you can start to get a feedback loop, kind of in intelligence, where the more you customize, you get more engagement.

And the more engagement you get, you get more data and that data makes your machine learning smarter and therefore you can make even better products, services aspects of personalization. So, this whole bucket has become dramatically more powerful in the last two years. It’s kind of, it’s one of the big reasons I’m talking about this.

And I’m going to talk a lot about this bucket because I think for most [00:08:00] businesses that are digital, the playbook is going to be build your moat, run a marathon in personalization and never-ending customer improvements. And machine learning is the engine of that more and more. Not in all cases, but in a lot of cases.

So anyways, that’s kind of what I’m talking about. So those are the big two concepts for today. Digital operating basics too, and rate of learning intelligence and adaptation as a marathon where you can build real competitive advantages. Okay, the L in smile. So those are the concepts for today. Let’s sort of get to the so what.

Personalization. We’ll start, that’s kind of the simplest thing. That’s what people have been talking about for a good 10 years. What does that mean? Well, yeah, if you think about how do I improve the customer experience? And I’m going to talk mostly about consumers. B2B it works just as well, but we’re going to talk about consumers. [00:09:00]

How do I improve the consumer experience as a fashion brand? As a retailer, as a supermarket, as a beauty skin care company, as a media company. Well, within that, the biggest bang for your buck for a long time has been personalization. If you ever think about how crazy it is that we all walk into Zara and they have their inventory, their merchandise, when they spend a lot of time planning their merchandising, Zara’s famous for it.

And we all see, now they’ve kind of made their name by changing their merchandise very quickly, which is why their factories are all in northern Spain. Even though it’s more expensive, it allows them to change the merchandise in the markets of Europe very quickly, as opposed to being, hey, we’ve got to plan our merchandising six to nine months ahead.

Well, they can, they can change things within weeks. Usually a month, [00:10:00] something like that. Okay, that’s helpful that you can change your merchandise, but everyone walking into the Zara store is still seeing the same product mix, having the same experience, talking to I mean, it’s a very one size fits all service for everybody.

So, if you can personalize that, you know, you go into Taobao, you go into Zara online, and suddenly my Zara is completely different than yours are. That is a massive jump in the consumer experience. It’s a huge lever to pull personalization. Okay. And we’re seeing that across the board. In media, the fact that my Netflix is different than your Netflix, that’s, that’s a big change from when we all had the same cable package.

Even though it had 200 shows, okay, that was better than having three stations and channels. Now we have 300 channels. Okay, that’s better, but personalization is even [00:11:00] better. TikTok is a personalization engine. So, every time this lever gets pulled, it usually has a big impact on the consumer, you know, experience.

Not always, but usually. Personalized product pages. Chatbots that say, Hello Jeff, did you get the package we sent you on Friday? Oh, it’s late? Let me deal with that, right? That personalized chatbots are a lot better. Promotions, you know, when you put something into your cart on Amazon, it says, would you also like this?

Well, that’s all personalized. Communications, marketing, all of that. Content creation has become a big deal. Why? Because billboard ads, banner ads, look, they just don’t have that much power to them. If you’re going to engage your consumers in your story, in your merchant story and get them to care, you’re going to have to create content, articles, [00:12:00] videos, podcasts.

You can do them in house. You can work with influencers. You can work with others. Okay. Unfortunately, the volume of content has gone through the stratosphere. Everybody is getting overwhelmed with content. There’s too many videos. There’s too many emails in my inbox. There’s too many podcasts that have just downloaded that I’m following.

It’s getting harder and harder to reach people because the volume of content has just gone through the roof and Generative AI just took it up another 20 levels because everyone can make videos now. You can automate your video production with Gen AI. You can automate your article creation with Gen AI.

I mean everyone’s productivity just went up by a factor of a hundred. Okay, that’s not great for consumers because they already had too much content. So how do you deal with all that? Well, according to Chris Tung, the chief marketing officer of Alibaba, he says, look, the only thing you can, consumers are still going to get overwhelmed. [00:13:00]

It’s not going away. Personalizing your content per consumer or per small micro group of consumers or per demographic or content that is specific to one specific event or occasion or one type of consumer action. Whenever we see a trigger by a consumer that they clicked on something or they, you know, then we personalize the content for that particular event versus demographic.

That’s the best that you can do as a content creator or merchant or a brand. You’ve got to personalize your content. There’s too much of it now. So, all of that is a big, big deal. Okay, fine. That’s your standard personalization intro. Now the first thing a company would do in this situation is They would look at personalization across the sales cycle.

And typically, people break the sales cycle [00:14:00] into five stages. I’ll put the graphic in the show notes. It’s a pretty good graphic, actually. Let me get my list here. Okay, so number one would be awareness. Is a consumer aware of your brand? Do they know you exist? And this has to sort of percolate in the back of your the more you can personalize that to a specific customer type.

You know, ideally you want to have a market of one. You want your whole product, all of it to be person by person by person. Now that’s not practical in most cases. So, you’re going to talk about groups of consumers, things like that. But awareness is sort of step one. The customer’s aware of it, potential customer.

At some point they move into the consideration of a purchase. Okay. The consideration phase, you have to compete there, which means you’ve got to personalize there. Then they get to the moment of purchase. You’ve got to compete for that step, you’ve got to personalize. Then there’s [00:15:00] post purchase, which one of two things happens.

That you either lose them as a customer, because they bought your thing and they’re done, or they didn’t like it, or it was a onetime type of purchase like a car, or they had a bad experience and they go away, so you’ve got to, can we reclaim them? So, there’s post purchase personalization and engagement.

And then there’s a loyalty phase, where sometimes post purchase they come back to you. So those are kind of the five stages. Loyalty, generally speaking, is decreasing in this world. And so, you know, you have to play that game and it’s important, but it’s getting harder and harder. There’s just, you know, it’s fewer people in this world are getting married when everyone can date around forever.

It’s kind of like that. There’s less loyalty for brands when there is an endless stream of potential brands to try, right? We live in an age of abundance. Loyalty is decreasing. Okay, so you can kind of [00:16:00] break it into those five stages and I’ll put a graphic in there that’s a good way to think about it.

Fine. They call that the customer loop. If you look at the graphic, you’ll see it. Why? Fine. That’s the sales process. You generally start breaking your customers into groups. People often talk about six types of groups. I’ll put these in the show notes as well. But basically, you want to, you know, the worst-case scenario is a lapsed consumer.

They bought from you in the past, they’ve disappeared. So, if you’re dealing with that group, what do you do? Well, you have to try to get them to come back. It’s actually easier to do that often than finding new consumers, but that would be a very different personalization strategy because your need with that group is better.

You’re not trying to sell them right now. You’re just trying to get them to re-engage from lapsed. Okay, above that you have a group we call disengaged. This is all from BCG, this list I’m giving you. The previous [00:17:00] list is kind of a McKinsey one. This is a BCG one. Okay, you’ve got a group, they’re not lapsed, but they’re kind of not active anymore.

Typically, what you might do with them is, okay, they’re your customer, they’re not mad at you, but they’re not buying your product. So, you try and hit them with a new type of product and get them to engage with something else. They’re still there, but they’re not buying. They’re tired of the soda you’re buying, so let’s give them a variation on the soda.

So that’s kind of disengaged above them, and you can kind of put these in a hierarchy. Next up, Deal Seekers. Okay, these are people that do buy from you, but they ain’t great. They hunt around for a better deal. You know, I’m gonna buy this Sony PlayStation. Where can I get the cheapest one? They’re gonna shop around.

They’re going to shop around at your competitors. Deal Seekers. So typically, when you’re thinking about engaging with them and personalizing what you’re doing, you’re thinking [00:18:00] about how can we get them to repeat purchase. Well, reward programs might be good. They’re buying, we just want them to sort of stay with us, not switch.

So, you might think rewards, promotions, things like that. Next up on the list would be single category regulars. Okay, they buy regularly from you, but they stick with one category. They’re always buying one type of makeup from you. They’re not buying your other types of skincare products. They’re buying skincare from you, but you know, they’re not buying hair products.

So, you want to sort of create incentives for them to try something in a new category. You want them to do a trial. So free promotions, free trials, you know, as they’re buying their regular product, you might put in free. You know, little bottles of your new type of product and get them to trial it. Okay, personalization is going to be very different there, but that’s the goal.

Next up best, better categories. I’m sorry, [00:19:00] better type of a customer multi category. They’re buying from lots of stuff from you. They’re buying across your category. That’s awesome. Your biggest problem there is going to be probably churn. How do we keep them in that We love what they’re doing. How do we keep them?

How do we stop losing them? And then top of the pyramid, your best brand advocates. They’re your evangelists. They tell your, their friends about you and your products. That’s all. So those kind of six levels, and I’ll put the list in the show notes. So that’s those two frameworks I’ve given you, the five steps of the sales process and the six different types of customers.

You can build a very solid personalization strategy against that. Let’s personalize against the five customer types. Let’s personalize against the five steps of purchasing. Solid. That’s not bad. People have been doing that for about, you know, 10, 15 years. [00:20:00] Okay. How do you do that organizationally? Cause that’s usually the problem.

You’ve got to work across a bunch of teams. Generally, you want three things. One, as I kind of mentioned, you need somebody or a team that reports to the CEO that can work across all the functions because you’ve got to work on all the touch points. It doesn’t do, doesn’t help you to personalize the marketing.

If they’re having bad experiences at customer service, it doesn’t do well to do customer service if you’re not personalizing the content. Depending on what you’re selling. Okay. So, you need organizational, a simple change, not too hard. You got to identify three to four use cases to start with. And you know, you want a use case that’s going to have a, an ROI.

You want, you know, you got to start with something simple. Let’s say three, those things have got to put money back in your pocket to keep the [00:21:00] organization dedicated. So, if we’re going to do personalization use case, number one, we’ve got to see the sales numbers go up in six months. And ideally, this should pay for itself.

Every personalization project use case should pay for itself. Because you’re increasing your sales, you’re increasing your engagement, you’re getting new customers, something like that. The use cases, you can usually figure those out in a pretty fun way. You know, Saturday morning workshop with the whole management team.

It’s not that hard. You just schedule it in a hotel. You go do it. You can come up with a couple of use cases. For something like retail, Zara, you’re not going to do a lot of content creation. What you’re going to do is a lot of marketing and promotions. That’s where your use case is going to hit. Fashion, as opposed to just retail, you’re talking content creation.

Beauty products, you’re talking content creation. Because you’re doing a lot of education about new [00:22:00] products. So, depending on what business you’re in, you’re going to focus on different aspects of personalization. You’re not going to do all the sort of divisions. You know, depending what your use case is, you’re going to focus on two or three major buckets, like content, customer service.

Maybe we’re just going to focus on, on pain points for returning goods. That might be your personalization focus for a retailer. Okay, so one, you make the org change. Two, you identify a couple use cases. Three, you make sure that there’s a positive ROI for each use case so people feel like it was worth it.

Financial ROI is best. Okay, maybe you’re not making your money back, but if you get a bunch of new customers and new data, sometimes that’s good too. And number four, you got to measure the time it takes to launch a use case. Ideate, put it in place, and then launch it. And you want to get that down to about 5 to [00:23:00] 7 days.

Because the game is going to be a marathon. You know, it’s not like we do 1 or 2 or 3 use cases over 3 months. No, no, we want to be doing 2 or 3 per week, ideally. That’s how you run a marathon. The rate of launch of personalization use cases is a big deal. So, think, you want to ultimately get to 5 to 7 days.

Maybe you can start off, you can get there in a month, it’s fine. Anyways, that’s kind of steps 4. That’s basic personalization. I’m not saying anything new here. Let me get to sort of my new stuff. And that is basically that like, you got to get past personalization and you got to think about experiences and constantly improving the user experience.

And that’s a bigger project than what I just said. Okay, so that’s the personalization, a simple playbook. But then we got to take it up to the next level. I’ve argued for a couple [00:24:00] years now that, look, personalization is no longer enough. You’ve got to move it up to what I call Wow Experiences. And that’s, that term Wow Experiences is from Coupang, South Korea’s sort of leading e commerce platform.

Basically, very similar to Amazon and JD in China, you know, oh, by the way, if you look at their numbers in the last six months, they’ve been absolutely crushing it in South Korea. Anyways, they have a term that everything they do on their e commerce site, the standard, the threshold is we have to create wow experiences for our customers every day.

Now that’s sort of the bar. So, anything they do has to clear that bar and that’s a good way to think about it. Okay. A personalization use case could be that, but I think it’s talking to more than that when they start talking about user experiences. And notice how they say [00:25:00] every day. So, it’s a marathon.

We do it all the time. We’re continually wowing our customers with different. It could be promotions. It could be a new service. It could be a new event or a holiday as festival, but they understand that long term they’re not just personalizing. They are continually wowing their customers. Now, Xiaomi and they’re a service-based company, right?

They’re an online retailer. Xiaomi comes at it the same way, but they’re not a service-based company. They’re a product-based company, right? Smart electronics, smartphones, smart chopsticks Air Buds, all of that. And most of those products are sold one time. So, they don’t have an ongoing customer interaction where they can continually wow you with experiences every time you log back in.

No, you buy the smartphone, they don’t hear you from you for another year, two years. So, it’s a little more [00:26:00] difficult when you’re, when you’re selling one-time purchases. So, what they talk about, and it’s in there, their 10k, which is very good by the way, is they are in the business of constantly thrilling their customers.

Because that’s how they get them to come back into the store, right? People walk by the Xiaomi store and they stop in all the time because they want to see what they do have now because they keep releasing new products all the time. They’re very good at it. They do it in house, but they also do it through partners.

Apple is not very good at this anymore. Do you even need to walk into an Apple store? Is there even going to be a new product to there? Of course not. It’s going to be the same basic products they’ve had for 15 years. Every month you go into a Xiaomi store, you will probably see something new. So, people always go in.

I always go in. They’re very good at rolling out new products, but the phrase they use is the need to continually thrill our customers. [00:27:00] It can’t just be new products. It has to thrill them. Well, that sounds a little bit like coupons, wow experiences, but just from the product point of view. So, when, you know, Apple said they were going to launch an EV 10 years ago, and I was, okay, whatever, we’ll see.

And they spent like 10 billion. I didn’t really believe they’d ever do it, to tell you the truth. When Xiaomi two years ago said, we’re going to launch an EV and we’ve never done anything in cars, I was kind of like, put a, put a red, you know, put an asterisk next to this company. If anyone’s going to surprise us, it’s going to be Xiaomi because they’re very good at creating entirely new products that thrill people.

And sure enough, they launched the SU 7 about two years after they announced they’re going into auto. And you know, the CEO of Ford apparently had one shipped to Michigan and has been driving it around for six months and says it’s pretty amazing, right? He wanted to see how good they were and it turns out the SU7 is pretty [00:28:00] awesome.

So, look up the Xiaomi SU7 if you have it. So, but that’s again, thrilling your customers from a product point of view versus wow experiences. But you can, you can start to see that personalization starts to move up a level to wowing. Well, that’s different than personalization. I think that’s the next level up.

But I would put it under my sort of banner of, you know, DOB2. Continually, the never-ending improvements to the customer experience. That’s the marathon. Okay. Now, I think you can take it up even another level, which is, look, we’re not just going to have new experiences and maybe new thrilling products.

We’re going to complete; we’re going to add completely new services and products that complement our core. That’s a very interesting idea. And I talked about this a month or two ago when I talked about digital attacker. [00:29:00] How do you break into an existing You know, sort of an existing business with a, an entrenched incumbent.

Let’s say something like travel services. Well, you come in with one new hot product like OTA, an online travel business like Expedia or Airbnb. That’s your core business, but then you start to flesh out complementary services. As quickly as possible. So, you, you offer plane tickets and trains and experiences.

So digital companies are very good of like, look, we’ve got one hot core product, let’s start to build complimentary services around it. And then we’ll offer bundles. To me, that’s the same game. Okay, we started with personalization. That was good. Then we upped our game to wow experiences and thrilling products.

That’s level two. Now we’ve taken up to another level where we are continually rolling out new complimentary [00:30:00] services and we’re bundling all over the place. A good example of that is Alibaba. You know, they did e commerce, but they are, you know, they are always rolling out new services to consumers and to their merchants, and they’re bundling them all the time.

This is how they got into hotels, and how they’re doing factory digitization, and how they’re doing, you know, you know, Merchant, Merchant Marketing Services, and Merchant Logistics, and Merchant Payment, and Merchant Credit. They are always playing this game. And if you look at how they talk about their business, they don’t usually talk about network effects.

Like Ant Financial in particular, they will always say that our core strategy is to continually add value to our customers. That they view it as a race. And so even if you copy what they’re doing, they They’re always two to three years ahead of you, but they mostly focus on services. [00:31:00] They’ve been doing all the other stuff, personalization for 10 years.

So, when they talk about continually adding value to our customers, that’s our core strategy. They’re usually talking about launching new services. So that would be kind of the next level up. And then there’s one last level and that’ll be it for today. When you start talking about offering AI services, which is what Alibaba is doing right now, well, Alibaba’s AI services, and they’re starting with DingTalk AI, and they’re going to be announcing a big new AI service next Tuesday.

I’ve talked with their media relations a bit, so it’s still under embargo, but look for next Tuesday. They will roll something out. AI services are like superpowered. Because not only do they add value to the customer, so it’s a powerful way to do this marathon but there’s a data feedback loop with the machine learning that runs these AI driven [00:32:00] services.

So, I, I need a new term for this. It’s not a marathon. You know, everything I just said we could describe as a personalization marathon. This is more like getting a scooter. You know, everyone’s running the marathon with sneakers and you got a scooter. AI powered services, I think are the next level of this game.

And that’s kind of what I’m looking for. Alibaba is definitely doing this. Anyways, keep a lookout for the news next week. Anyways, that’s kind of the levels I’m thinking about. That’s why I’ve been talking a lot about machine learning and AI based services and how they can add user value. Yeah, we’ll see.

Anyways, that is it for today. So that was quite a bit of theory and frameworks about how to think about this whole bucket. Personalization, never ending customer improvements. For those of you who are subscribers, I’m going to write all this up in the next day and I’ll start to give you usable frameworks for how to do this if you’re running a [00:33:00] business.

Or if you’re an investor assessing a business, you can start to sort of grade a company based on how well they’re doing this. You know, and if you want to make a bet on a company, assess their moat and assess how well they’re running this particular marathon. For certain company types like fashion and beauty.

If you’re looking at SpaceX, none of this helps you because the marathon Elon Musk is running, it’s not personalization. He’s running an innovation, a tech innovation marathon. Well, that’s, that’s a different one of the, the smile marathons. So, but this is going to be very common for B2C and B2B. Anyways, that is it for today.

I’m sorry for, for sort of being gone for a week or two. I’m playing ketchup right now. I felt bad about that, but I was kind of running all over the place, like in Dubai, which was great fun. I’ll talk about that. I think in the next podcast, I had a good old time in Dubai, which I really liked. You know, I spent a lot of years in the Middle East and I’m sort of [00:34:00] working on some businesses in Dubai, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

So really fun. The city is beautiful, Dubai. It’s about I was doing business there on the ground 2000, 2001. So, 24 years ago, and we were flying in from Beirut to Riyadh to Jeddah before Dubai really took off. When we were there in 2000, 2001, I was working on a company called Arabia. com, which was kind of the Yahoo!

portal for the Middle Eastern world. So, it was sort of an Arab Yahoo! It did very well and then the sort of tech crunch of 2001 crushed it pretty much, and we had to we basically went to Dubai Internet City, which was sort of in the boonies back then. It was in the middle of the desert almost, because Dubai was sort of on the river.

And you had to take a taxi about 15 minutes out to Dubai Internet City, which was all desert. And it was beautiful, but it was kind of this real [00:35:00] estate project. And that’s where Arabia. com was based. And we basically closed up their stuff in Dubai, and we moved a lot of their operations back to Amman, Jordan.

For Which is we called it the back to the garage strategy because there wasn’t enough revenue coming in and the market was shutting down. The advertising market was shutting down. But, yep, you go to Dubai Internet City now, it’s not even halfway across Dubai. It is surrounded. I stayed in an Airbnb nearby.

It’s, I mean, it’s just dense city. And you can go, you know, you know, that’s the middle of Dubai, if anything, at this point. So, it’s pretty fantastic what’s been happening. A lot of not a huge amount of tech coming out there, but the B2C markets, makeup, beauty, retail, fashion, cars it’s a pretty great market, the GCC, which is really just the UAE.

It’s really just a handful of cities, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City Riyadh and Jeddah. [00:36:00] Although I did meet a lot of businesspeople And I talked about what they were doing in beauty and where they were focusing. A lot of focus on Iraq and Iran. I heard a lot of people say, we’re doing Iraq and Iran.

But usually that’s a much lower price point. The four, five cities I just mentioned, the price points for beauty and makeup are pretty much the same as the EU. They’re not very different, but when you move it to Iraq, it comes down a lot. Anyways, it was a lot of fun. I’ll talk about it next in the next podcast.

I’ll write it up, and I’ll do some stuff. Anyways, that is it for me. I hope everyone is doing well. There’s a lot of content on the way. Anyways, cheers. Talk to you next week. Bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

I am the founder of TechMoat Consulting, a boutique consulting firm that helps retailers, brands, and technology companies exploit digital change to grow faster, innovate better and build digital moats. Get in touch here.

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