Download or read book How Brands Built Its Sustainable Competitive Advantage The Key Success Factors Amazon Walmart Starbucks Netflix McDonalds and Nike written by Shah Mohammed M and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a collection of the personal blogs of the author.The first Amazon website had a rudimentary search engine. People were worried about sharing credit card details over the website. Many predicted that Amazon would be swallowed by Barnes and Noble. But... within two decades, the same Amazon grew exponentially and transformed into an insurmountable giant of online retailing.In the year 1962, Hundreds of discounting stores popped up over the whole of the USA along with the three giants Woolworths, K-mart and Dayton-Hudson. Everyone thought that those giants would conquer the world. And then one guy started a small discounting store called 'Wal-Mart' in a small town called Rogers, Arkansas. Nobody gave him any importance. No media covered him. But.... five decades later, Kmart has 365 stores with the sales of $25 billion to Wal-Mart's 11,718 stores with the sales of $500 billion. Target's revenue in 2017 was $72 billion.An English teacher Jerry Baldwin, History teacher Zev Siegel and Writer Gordon Bowker opened their first Starbucks store in Seattle on March 31, 1971. Due to financial difficulties in the mid-1980s, they sold their Six stores to their former employee Howard Schultz. Howard, then re-imagined and re-invented Starbucks. As of 2018, the company operates stores at 28,218 locations worldwide.In the year 1997, two technology entrepreneurs Reed Hastings & Marc Randolph came together and started an online DVD rental by mail company called Netflix, to exploit the growing demand for online services. The odds of the company surviving against offline retail-chain stores like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Movie Gallery were slim. Yet Netflix overcame those challenges and slowly established market leadership.In the 1950s, One German company dominated the American shoe market. Yet, athletes were not getting shoes what they wanted. In that scenario, in the year 1964, Phil Knight, a track athlete, who had just graduated out of college, started a company called 'Blue Ribbon Sports' in partnership with his track field coach 'Bill Bowerman', with an initial investment of $1000 and began to sell 'Tiger' brand sports shoes. In the year 1971, he was forced to start manufacturing his own brand of shoes under the name 'Nike'. By 2017, the company became the world's largest supplier of athletic shoes and sports apparel and a major manufacturer of sports equipment.Ray Kroc, aged 52, diabetic, with medical problems in knee and hip, purchased a franchise right for one of the McDonalds' stores with an aim to sell more multi-mixers. But he went on to transform McDonald's business itself. In the next 63 years, McDonald's network grew to nearly 35,000 stores in 119 countries.How did these brands build their sustainable competitive advantage? What are the key success factors?

Download or read book The Origin of Brands written by Al Ries and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What Charles Darwin did for biology, Al and Laura Ries do for branding. In their exciting new book, The Origin of Brands, the Rieses take Darwin's revolutionary idea of evolution and apply it to the branding process. What results is a new and strikingly effective strategy for creating innovative products, building a successful brand, and, in turn, achieving business success.Here, the Rieses explain how changing conditions in the marketplace create endless opportunities to build new brands and accumulate riches. But these opportunities cannot be found where most people and most companies look. That is, in the convergence of existing categories like television and the computer, the cellphone and the Internet. Instead, opportunity lies in the opposite direction—in divergence. By following Darwin's brilliant deduction that new species arise from divergence of an existing species, the Rieses outline an effective strategy for creating and taking to market an effective brand. In The Origin of Brands, you will learn how to: Divide and conquer Exploit divergence Use the theories of survival of the firstest and survival of the secondest Harness the power of pruning Using insightful studies of failed convergence products and engaging success stories of products that have achieved worldwide success through divergence, the Rieses have written the definitive book on branding. The Origin of Brands will show you in depth how to build a great brand and will lead you to success in the high-stakes world of branding.