The campaign was praised for shattering beauty stereotypes in advertising, and contributed to a doubling in sales. Yet its core insight is remarkably similar to the one in a Body Shop campaign that ran seven years earlier: “there are 3 billion women who don’t look like supermodels and only 8 who do.”
All Threads
There were 236 different words in Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book The Cat in the Hat. So Bennet Cerf, Geisel’s publisher and co-founder of Random House, challenged Geisel to write a children’s book with only 50 different words, and they bet $50 on the outcome. In 1960, Dr Seuss delivered Green Eggs and Ham with exactly 50 different words. He won the bet and the book has sold ~10 million copies over its lifetime.
30% of Americans don’t drink at all, while the top 10% have 74 drinks per week.
In the early days of Dropbox, 60% abandoned the service and the team couldn’t figure out why. So they offered $40 to a man on Craigslist to use it in person, and quickly found people couldn’t understand seemingly basic features.
It isn’t actually a brand for dudes – 50% of its buyers are women, who choose the brand over traditional toilet paper mostly because it cleans better.
Duolingo has developed its own official English Test (DET) to help people demonstrate their language skills. The DET is now used for international admissions by more than 5,000 higher education programs worldwide, as well as for visas in the USA. & Ireland.
Duolingo employees don’t talk about ‘MVPs’ (Minimum Viable Products) during the design process – they talk about ‘V1s’. The logic? “MVPs often have a lower standard of quality and can be used as an excuse to ship subpar work. V1s, on the other hand, are polished. They may not have all the bells and whistles, but they meet our bar.” A small but subtle tweak that reminds the team to always deliver excellence.
The popular language learning app runs a Taqueria called Duo’s in Pittsburgh. It’s a great tool for building recognition, bringing in new customers, and fulfilling its main mission of improving language skills: customers can try the “Español Challenge” to get a discount on their order. It accounts for ~$1M of the ~$625M in revenue they make each year.
In September 2023, pub operator Stonegate caused an uproar by imposing ‘surge pricing,’ in the form of a 20p uplift on a pint of beer during evenings and weekends. Yet no one complains when airlines use the same system; charging more for a Saturday flight in July than a Wednesday flight in November.
James Dyson doesn’t talk about household appliances to describe his products – he talks about solving problems others seem to ignore. This has given him licence to expand into a range of categories beyond vacuum cleaners, most notably hair dryers.
James Dyson re-invented vacuum cleaners without a background in engineering. He came up with the idea of a bagless vacuum after seeing how sawmills used cyclone force to eject sawdust, and his knowledge of furniture and interior design helped him create a successful prototype.
Hon Lik invented the e-cigarette in an attempt to kick his own smoking habit. Unfortunately, he’s now a dual user.
At the peak of Covid-19, we were told that e-commerce would transform the world. It turns out online shopping has followed the same growth trajectory it was on before the virus.
In 2011, Insiders at eBay were convinced their Google search ads were increasing website traffic. After all, the data showed that the more money spent on these ads, the more people clicked on the link to the eBay website. In reality, the ads weren’t causing more people to click on the link – they were simply guiding a growing number of people who were already looking for it. eBay eventually switched off the advertising and found a negligible impact on traffic.
The 2019 Nissan Dynamo was the first fully electric cab in London… since 1897, when Walter Bersey launched his fleet of battery powered taxis. Unfortunately, the weight of the batteries caused a significant amount of wear and tear on the tyres and the fleet was withdrawn within two years.