Think of a retail store that can “market itself to consumers as an ‘everything’ store, with an unrivaled range of products, often sold for minuscule profit.”1 Fulfilling and sustaining this alluring “everything store” promise would require a relentless focus on customers, striving to satisfy everyone’s needs and wants. In this particular case, the “company’s feel for consumer demand was so uncanny … that it became, for many of its diehard customers, not just the best retail option, but the only one worth considering.”2
At first glance, this seems to be an accurate description of the massive Chinese retail platform Alibaba, which holds its “Singles Day” on November 11 each year. Alibaba reported that it sold merchandise worth 268.4 billion Yuan (around $38.3 billion) during the 2019 event, spread across more than two hundred thousand brands. Dubbed “the biggest sales event in the history of the planet,” Singles Day 2019 easily broke the previous year’s record of 213.5 billion Yuan (nearly $30.5 billion).3 The company’s slogan of “Yesterday’s best is today’s starting line” is a testament to Alibaba’s desire to shatter records again and again.
The first paragraph of this chapter could also be an accurate description of Amazon, which has more than one hundred million customers in its Amazon Prime program and in 2018 became only the second company in history to achieve a market capitalization in excess of $1 trillion.4 The numbers from Amazon Prime Day in 2019 show the extent to which Amazon has anchored itself in the minds of customers around the world. Customers purchased over 175 million products in the forty-eight-hour shopping spree, which represents 1,013 products sold per second!5
Yet the “everything store” we are referring to is not Alibaba. Nor is it Amazon.
It is Sears.
Of course, we mean Sears in its heyday, which seemed to last for most of the twentieth century. We mean the company that began as a mail-order business in the late 1800s and quickly rose to a level of prominence that in its day rivaled what Alibaba and Amazon enjoy today. In fact, this odd juxtaposition of retail giants from radically different eras suggests that companies have repeatedly found success by complementing operational excellence with a relentless focus on customers. This mix has marked the rise of modern commerce since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks to a long list of pioneers, commerce over the last century has changed from an inward-looking activity—making whatever an organization’s own skills allowed and then “shoving it” into the hands of customers—to an external one driven by an obsession to understand the attitudes and behaviors of the individuals or businesses that actually purchase.
It is undeniable that, as a management philosophy, customer focus has helped millions of people and enterprises gain unprecedented access to products and services, encouraged consumption by educating markets on an offering’s true benefits and range of applications, and fostered the innovation that allows organizations to make increasingly bolder promises of performance, and often meet them. Yet despite all this progress, commerce is still hampered by the type of inefficiencies raised in the introduction of this book.
What is the problem? Why is commerce still so wasteful? In our mind, the issue is not that customer focus is somehow flawed or broken. To the contrary, the issue is that most organizations fail to take the promise of customer focus to its logical conclusion. That is, the typical company today may well obsess over customers when it comes to designing offerings and positioning them in the market. In fact, we struggle to find a business that doesn’t praise its customers, and boast of the attention paid to them, on its corporate website. But then the same company pays hardly any attention to customers when it decides how to earn revenue from them. This lapse shrinks the opportunity in the market.
There are at least two reasons why customer focus typically breaks down where it does. First, an organization simply may not appreciate the importance of aligning the revenue model with how customers derive value from their purchases. Accordingly, somewhere after ideation and new product or service development, many companies forget the promises made to customers and fret over internal constraints. What did it cost us to bring this solution to market? How much risk are we willing to tolerate? What is the desired return on our investment?
Second, until recently companies had no meaningful information on how customers interact with, and hopefully derive value from, their purchases. While it is hard to imagine taking a customer-focused approach to the task of generating revenue with no visibility beyond the moment of purchase, it is also true that the importance of gathering information on consumption and performance was largely ignored or dismissed in the past. Again, when the top line is at stake, companies tend to be conservative.
Now, in the twenty-first century, technology offers the opportunity to unravel the mystery, take customer focus full circle, and consequently address much of the waste that persists in commerce. We’ll talk more about this game-changing technology and how an organization can harness it in the next chapter. For the time being, however, we want to trace the evolution of customer focus through time. In particular, the next three sections describe the genesis and rise of mass production, mass distribution, and mass communication.
It is impossible to describe and interpret the Industrial Revolution without making substantial use of words such as “mass” and “scale.” In the second half of the eighteenth century, Adam Smith became one of the first economists to document and explain the effect of scale on industrialization, linking it to his theories about the division of labor: “The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase in the productive powers of labour.”6 He elaborated on this idea by claiming that the division of labor ultimately leads to the creation of wealth for the masses: “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.”7
Companies in the nascent industrial world of the 1800s had to learn how to make and sell products economically, so not to price themselves out of the market. For some, the biggest obstacle in fact was figuring out how to manufacture a product in the first place. The bulk of the time, effort, and money went into improving production, both in terms of the physical process on the factory floor and of the mix of features and elements of the product, including engineering, design, quality of the inputs, and consistency. Because competition was minimal, manufacturers felt no pressure to “fit” their product to the unique needs and wants of different customers or customer groups. From their perspective, customers were lucky enough to have an affordable alternative before them.
A perfect example of this is the work of Henry Ford, who introduced the mass-produced car over a century ago. Prior to the introduction of the Ford Model T, cars were clearly a niche product. The bulk of the population could not immediately appreciate the need for them, never mind afford one. Being the visionary that he was, Ford proclaimed, “I will build a motor car for the great multitude. It will be so low in price that no man will be unable to own one.”8 To figure out that low price, Ford did not commission sophisticated market research to understand what his potential customers wanted and were willing to pay handsomely for. Instead, he decided to anchor the price on the costs of production. These costs dropped dramatically as Ford pushed for greater productivity at the assembly line, taking full advantage of Adam Smith’s theory on the division of labor and its impact.
Within one year, productivity, measured in terms of the time needed to manufacture a single vehicle, improved from 12.5 hours to only 93 minutes.9 Accordingly, Ford could afford to lower the price further and crack open the market even wider. Production rose from 10,000 cars in 1908 to 933,720 cars in 1920.10 And the key to this massive improvement was the resolute consistency of the product. Ford was known to say that customers could own a brand-new Model T in any color they wanted as long as it was black. He had recognized the broad need for affordable, dependable transportation, but refused to indulge in what today we call “personalization” (when the organization adapts the product) or “customization” (when customers do it). The mere existence of the Model T, and its attractive price, were sufficient arguments to drive sales.
Over time, however, production technologies reduced the costs of manufacturing in many markets to the point that the attention of organizations naturally shifted from making “stuff” economically to selling more in the face of rising competition. Customers started having choice, and one way to get their attention, organizations figured, was to get better at giving the public what they actually wanted.
The U.S. automotive industry witnessed this shift in a rather dramatic way in the 1920s. While Ford at the time still wanted to make one car “so low in price that no man will be unable to own one,” Alfred P. Sloan, the president and chairman of General Motors (GM), believed the better strategy was to offer one car “for every purse and purpose.” This idea led GM to product a tiered range of cars, with Chevrolet at the low end of the quality and price spectrum and Cadillac at the high end. When Sloan took over at GM, Ford boasted a market share of 60 percent, compared to the small 12 percent held by GM.11 By 1931, however, GM had become the world’s largest automaker, a title it held for the next seventy-seven years until Toyota took over.12
The combination of operational excellence with the realization that addressing customer tastes can pay off made the difference. The subheading of a 2008 article in Automotive News summed up the situation succinctly: “Roaring Twenties made it clear that people were buying status and novelty, not just a ride.”13 That article cited several reasons for the rise of GM, whose Chevrolet brand made vast inroads into the dominance of the Model T, including the development of flexible manufacturing techniques, the growing influence of styling, and the impact of advertising on the relationship of the customer to the product.14
Once organizations figured out how to manufacture assortments of goods in a cost-effective, consistent manner, the focus shifted once again. Distribution stepped in as the new bottleneck in business. Indeed, when competition first enters a market, most companies tend to rush to make their offerings stand out in a way that is meaningful to customers. But as companies slowly exhaust the obvious avenues for differentiation, they then work to make their “go to market” approach—the structure by which products and services reach those interested in buying—more pervasive and convenient to customers.
The rise of Sears is representative of the evolution of mass distribution. A Smithsonian Magazine article summed up the company’s legacy in one sentence: “Sears taught Americans how to shop.”15 For the first few decades of its existence, Sears was the Amazon of its day, making an unprecedented array of goods available to rural America. In fact, just as Amazon originally focused its attention on books, Sears started off in 1893 selling just one product: watches.16 It also did not have a physical, bricks-and-mortar presence until it opened the first department store in 1925. The company’s own statements in the early 1900s demonstrate a strong desire to improve access through scale. “We are able by reason of our enormous output of goods to make contracts with representative manufacturers and importers for such large quantities of merchandise that we can secure the lowest possible prices,” Sears claimed.17 In this case, price was the handmaiden of distribution, with a simple objective (to lower prices relentlessly) achieved by means of massive scale.18 Sears’s dominance as a retailer and catalog house endured into the 1970s, when roughly half of all households in the United States possessed the company’s proprietary credit card.19
Of course, one could argue that mass distribution predates mass production because people have been shipping bulk agricultural commodities over long distances for centuries. Whether we look at the Silk Road, the Hanseatic League, or the ocean-going European fleets of the Middle Ages, the goal of finding and exploiting more profitable trade routes is nothing new. However, agricultural commodities aside, the true emergence of large-scale, organized distribution has its roots in the new enabling technologies of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. One of those great technologies was rail transportation. In the United States, as was the case elsewhere in the world, the railroad played a critical role in helping individuals gain access to the goods they desired in timely fashion. One study from 1944 concluded: “It was far more important that the railroad brought transportation to areas that without it could have had scarcely any commercial existence at all.… Historically, the very existence of most American communities and regions, of particular farms and industrial firms and aggregates, was made possible by the railroad.”20 Marshall McLuhan, the late Canadian philosopher, recognized the transformative role of railroads, writing: “Although America developed a massive service of inland canals and river steamboats, they were not geared to the speeding wheels of the new industrial production. The railroad was needed to cope with mechanized production, as much as to span the great distances of the continent.”21
The growth of the city of Chicago is a microcosm of the converge of mass production and mass distribution. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Sandburg began and ended his poem “Chicago” by describing the city as “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.”22 Not coincidentally, Chicago was the headquarters of direct-mail retail giants such as Spiegel (founded in 1865), Montgomery Ward (1872), and of course Sears, as well as a leading manufacturing and printing center. And while its share of rail freight has ebbed and flowed over the last 150 years, Chicago continues to enjoy a dominant position: in 2018, half of all U.S. rail freight shipments passed through the city.23 Trucking has long since eclipsed rail as the leading mode of freight transportation in the United States, but the gap is surprisingly small: in 2017, trucking represented 40 percent of all shipments, as measured in ton-miles, while rail accounted for just under 33 percent.24
With production and distribution seemingly “resolved,” organizations turned their attention to yet another preoccupation. Instead of asking “How do we manufacture and deliver the products customers truly want in an economical way?,” they started asking “How can we best compete for customer attention?”
Organizations realized that they needed a more nuanced commercial recipe in order to break through the clutter of competition and nurture demand in the market. This recipe would complement the efforts already spent on improving and tailoring products and services according to customer needs and wants by fine tuning the more “intangible,” brand-related elements of an offering. The objective was clear: to position one’s products and services proactively in the minds of existing and potential customers. Accomplishing this goal was important enough, and potentially lucrative enough, that companies began to engage in structured market research and seek greater sophistication in the way they communicated. Mass advertising was born.
One can argue that the United States in the late nineteenth century was fertile ground for professional communication and advertising to take hold. Stressing the role of books as the first modern mass-produced media product, McLuhan noted, “The homogenizing power of the literate process had gone further in America by 1800 than anywhere in Europe. From the first, America took to heart the print technology for its educational, industrial, and political life.”25 The emergence and subsequent adoption of other technologies such as the phonograph, film, and radio “had far-reaching effects upon American society. They broke down the isolation of local neighborhoods and communities and ensured that for the first time all Americans—regardless of their class, ethnicity, or locality—began to share standardized information and entertainment.”26
Mass advertising—and the modern marketing function as we know it—arose concurrently with these technologies. Packaged-goods manufacturers such as Kimberly-Clark and Palmolive, and other familiar brands including Goodyear Tires, grew swiftly in the early part of the twentieth century thanks to national advertising campaigns. Moreover, these campaigns often prompted the agencies of record to conduct further testing to document what today we refer to as “use cases.” Some use cases had a remarkable impact on a business. For example, the original purpose of Kleenex, which was launched in 1924 by a unit of Kimberly-Clark, was as a disposable remover for cold cream and makeup. In 1930, the advertising agency Lord & Thomas recommended that Kimberly-Clark conduct research to understand how people actually use the product in their everyday lives. Much to the company’s surprise, the exercise revealed that customers used Kleenex primarily to wipe their noses, not to remove makeup. This basic insight led to the repositioning of the product as a disposable handkerchief, and within a year it became a major contributor to the bottom line of Kimberly-Clark.27
Within a relatively short time, the use of market research to better understand customers and create communication material that resonated with them became more popular and more “scientific.” According to Claude Hopkins, arguably one of the great pioneers of advertising, “guesswork is very expensive.”28 In fact, one reason for the interest in rigor was the direct experience of agencies and copywriters on work commissioned by direct-mail companies. Hopkins described this experience with a nod toward the same obsession over operational excellence that propelled the birth of mass production and mass distribution: “The severest test of an advertising man is in selling goods by mail. False theories melt away like snowflakes in the sun. The advertising is profitable or it is not, clearly on the face of returns. Figures that do not lie tell one at once the merits of an ad. This puts men on their mettle. All guesswork is eliminated. Every mistake is conspicuous. There, one learns that advertising must be done on a scientific basis to have any fair chance of success. And he learns that every wasted dollar adds to the cost of results.”29
One significant step in the pursuit of rigor came in the 1930s thanks to Dr. George Gallup. Born in Iowa in 1901, Gallup earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and was teaching journalism classes when he began to research public opinion extensively. His early work, which included surveys of hundreds of ad executives, revealed that advertisements stressing a product’s efficacy and low price ranked high with the executives but carried “much less weight with the public.” He used these findings to advocate a more empirical approach to understanding customer preferences.30 He joined the advertising agency Young & Rubicam in 1932. Today, the eponymous firm Gallup later founded claims to know “more about ‘the will’ of 7 billion employees, customers, students and citizens than any other organization.”31
Sears was no outsider to this trend, as the company learned to combine its own operational prowess with a deeper knowledge of its customer base. In fact, the company’s success caught the attention of Peter Drucker, the legendary Austrian-born management thinker, who used it as one of his positive examples of how large organizations can learn to turn their attention away from itself and onto the markets they intend to serve. “True marketing starts out the way Sears starts out—with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values,” Drucker explained. “It does not ask, ‘What do we want to sell?’ It asks, ‘What does the customer want to buy?’ It does not say, ‘This is what our product or service does.’ It says, ‘These are the satisfactions the customer looks for, values, and needs.’”32
Advertising and marketing executives condensed their own groundbreaking findings into catchy concepts that survive to this day, including the popular notion of a “unique selling proposition.” Advertising executive Rosser Reeves came up with the idea in the late 1950s and introduced it in his book Reality in Advertising. He used a precise definition.33 First, “each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each advertisement must say to each reader: ‘Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.’” Second, he stressed that the “proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique—either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.” Noting that these two criteria are often easily met, he included the “mass” aspect with his third point: “The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e. pull over new customers to your product.”
Over the last three decades, organizations have intensified their orientation toward customers. Market research techniques continue to make inroads in understanding the true motivations of customers. The processes by which products and services are tailored to fit these individual motivations are also increasingly sophisticated. Amazon claims in its boilerplate that it is “guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking.”34 Echoing the early iterations of Sears and Ford, another global retail powerhouse, Sweden’s IKEA, operates under the following vision: “To create a better everyday life for the many people. Our business idea is to offer a wide range of well-designed, functional home furnishing products at prices so low that as many people as possible will be able to afford them.”35 However, as we will see next, the pursuit of customer focus as we commonly know it paradoxically stunted a similar evolution in the way organizations convert the value they create for customers into a financial return.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy’s famous remark that “any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand” typifies the perception that, while activities such as branding and communications are inherently strategic, creative, and difficult, the activities that lead to revenue are tactical, formulaic, and require little more than simple arithmetic.36 The “back end” of commerce, so to speak, is all about running the numbers.
Perhaps the most streamlined execution of a “deal” took place close to a century before Ogilvy’s quote, when American merchant and retail pioneer John Wanamaker invented the price tag in 1861.37 Wanamaker’s motivation for the price tag, the label that declares the purchase price of an item for sale, came from his economic sensibilities and attitude toward the standard practice of haggling, which he considered “inefficient and discourteous.”38 Price tags quickly became the norm because they greatly facilitated the ongoing push for customer focus in production, distribution, and communication. Indeed, it is hard to imagine the success of Montgomery Ward or Sears without a fixed price printed in the catalogs they shipped across the United States.
But this invention presented a new challenge. How do you decide on a price for all customers well in advance of an actual transaction? And how do you aggregate the likely differences in the willingness to pay across customers into a single number that is then printed for all to see? These seem like difficult questions to answer under the best of circumstances, let alone under those faced by most organizations throughout the better part of the twentieth century. Accordingly, organizations gradually shifted their pricing decisions away from customers and what they value, which was the focus of haggling, to the one piece of information they could trust and readily collect: information on the cost of making an offering and bringing it to market.
In essence, prices became a mere bystander in a company’s efforts to build closer ties with customers. Rather than considering how the process of generating revenue could assist in this endeavor, the company concerned itself with how to cover its costs and minimize any interference. The price tag went along for the ride, treated as a tactical afterthought, but this in turn cemented the idea that a company’s only logical move is to earn revenue from selling the “stuff” it makes.
In the next chapter, we look at how breakthrough technologies are drastically changing this perception. The back end of commerce is an organization’s unfinished business, and these developments serve as the catalyst for eliminating the access, consumption, and performance waste that lingers in today’s marketplaces.
1. D. Thompson, “The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/09/sears-predicts-amazon/540888/.
2. Thompson, “The History of Sears Predicts Nearly Everything Amazon Is Doing.”
3. A. Kharpal, “Alibaba Breaks Singles Day Record with More Than $38 Billion in Sales,” CNBC, November 11, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/11/alibaba-singles-day-2019-record-sales-on-biggest-shopping-day.html; see also M. Kaplan, “Alibaba’s 2019 Singles Day: $38 Billion; 200,000 Brands; 78 Countries,” Practical Ecommerce, November 14, 2019, https://www.practicalecommerce.com/alibabas-2019-singles-day-38-4-billion-200000-brands-78-countries.
4. A. Selyukh, “Long Kept Secret, Amazon Says Number of Prime Customers Topped 100 Million,” NPR, The Two Way (blog), April 18, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/18/603750056/long-kept-secret-amazon-says-number-of-prime-customers-topped-100-million.
5. Amazon, “Alexa, How Was Prime Day? Prime Day 2019 Surpassed Black Friday and Cyber Monday Combined,” press release, July 17, 2019, https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/alexa-how-was-prime-day-prime-day-2019-surpassed-black-friday.
6. A. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), Kindle, 6.
7. Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 6.
8. “Henry Ford: The Man Who Taught America How to Drive,” Entrepreneur, October 8, 2008, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/197524.
9. “Henry Ford.”
10. P. Vlaskovits, “Henry Ford, Innovation, and That ‘Faster Horse’ Quote,” Harvard Business Review, August 29, 2011, https://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast.
11. “Guru: Alfred Sloan,” The Economist, January 30, 2009, https://www.economist.com/news/2009/01/30/alfred-sloan.
12. K. Marr, “Toyota Passes GM as World’s Largest Automaker,” Washington Post, January 22, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/21/AR2009012101216.html?noredirect=on.
13. “Annual Model Change Was the Result of Affluence, Technology, Advertising: Roaring Twenties Made It Clear That People Were Buying Status and Novelty, Not Just a Ride,” Automotive News, September 14, 2008, http://www.autonews.com/article/20080914/OEM02/309149950/annual-model-change-was-the-result-of-affluence-technology-advertising.
14. “Annual Model Change Was the Result of Affluence, Technology, Advertising.”
15. V. Howard, “The Rise and Fall of Sears,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 25, 2017, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/rise-and-fall-sears-180964181/.
16. Z. Meyer, “Timeline: Sears’ Rise and Fall as Nation’s Top Retailer,” USA Today, March 22, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2017/03/22/sears-timeline/99488226/.
17. “Creating Mass Markets: Mass Distribution,” from Railroads: The Transformation of Capitalism exhibition and catalogue, Harvard Business School Historical Collections, 2012, https://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/railroads/mass-distribution.html.
18. Howard, “The Rise and Fall of Sears.”
19. E. McClelland, “Sears Is Dying: What the Ubiquitous Store’s Death Says about America,” Salon, April 13, 2014.
20. L. H. Jenks, “Railroads as an Economic Force in American Development,” The Journal of Economic History 4, no. 1 (May 1944): 1–20.
21. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press, [1964] 2002), Kindle, 113.
22. C. Sandburg, “Chicago” in Poetry (Poetry Foundation, 1914), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12840/chicago.
23. City of Chicago, “Chicago History,” https://www.cityofchicago.org/city/en/about/history.html, accessed June 5, 2019.
24. “U.S. Ton-Miles of Freight,” National Transportation Statistics, 2018 4th Quarter (U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2018), https://www.bts.gov/content/us-ton-miles-freight, accessed April 13, 2020.
25. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 352.
26. S. Mintz and S. McNeil, “The Rise of Mass Communication,” Digital History, 2018, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3315, accessed November 18, 2019.
27. J. L. Cruikshank and A. W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America: The Amazing (but True!) Story of Albert D. Lasker and the Creation of the Advertising Century (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), Kindle, 247.
28. C. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising (New York: McGraw-Hill Education, Advertising Age Classics Library, 1966), Kindle, 224.
29. Hopkins, My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, 229.
30. “Gallup Research,” AdAge, September 15, 2003, https://adage.com/article/adage-encyclopedia/gallup-research/98482/.
31. Gallup, “Recognized as One of the World’s Most Influential Americans. George H. Gallup, Founder | 1901–1984,” https://www.gallup.com/corporate/178136/george-gallup.aspx, accessed June 5, 2019.
32. P. F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), Kindle, 64.
33. R. Reeves, Reality in Advertising (New York: Widener Classic, [1961] 2015).
34. Amazon, “About Amazon,” https://www.aboutamazon.com/?utm_source=gateway&utm_medium=footer, accessed February 8, 2020.
35. IKEA, “Vision & Business Idea,” https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/this-is-ikea/about-the-ikea-group/vision-and-business-idea/, accessed June 5, 2019.
36. D. Ogilvy, The Unpublished David Ogilvy (London: Profile Books, 2012), 87.
37. “John Wanamaker,” from Who Made America?, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/theymadeamerica/whomade/wanamaker_hi.html, accessed June 5, 2019.
38. J. Surowiecki, “The Priceline Paradox,” New Yorker, May 22, 2000, 34.