Just incredible watching the speed of Amazon’s execution.  Very little legacy businesses will be able to do to match the pace without a total structural and cultural overhaul. 

Amazon starts the week with an amazing stick and ends it buying Wholefoods. In the middle rumors swirl about an enterprise software acquisition. All of which makes total stranger sense. 

Walmart, not wanting to skip a beat buys Bonobos. 

Initial coverage seems to be focusing on the moves as a online/offline retail convergence shift. That’s the tip of the iceberg. 

First, this is about acquiring distribution points and driving disruption in local delivery. Second, its about brand power. Besos gets brands and the power they have when backed by cash, great product and marketing. Look at what he did with the Washington Post. Wholefoods will get a brand boost and Amazon will get reach; a high income demographic, and a nice onramp to the largest retail segment – grocery. Wouldn’t be surprised to see Besos keep going – Trader Joes and others are good targets. 

Amazing. 

Great little post from Team Simple.

Have been collecting Marketing Workflows which I think, done right, unleash marketing productivity and efficiency. What’s interesting is how, well, primitive many of they are. Then I was bouncing around my Feedly feed and came across this piece over at Stacking Bricks. Was a really interesting view of a content workflow that you could manifest and largely automate in Simple.

THE WORKFLOW

• We write our articles in Markdown
• We use git locally to save our work
• We use github to share the repo across our team (me (Amy), Alex, Thomas and Becky)
• As we edit local files, the local (developer) copy of the site is continuously refreshed by guard
• The podcast listing and individual pages are automatically generated from our podcast feed
• When we git push all committed changes are automatically deployed to our host
• We added some features to nanoc to make curating our content so much easier, and will be adding so much more!

Lots of other stuff worth noting in the story – the idea of a clear process that gets into the meat of standardising things like meta data and more. And gotta love this:

Every piece of content has a slug — or short name — we can use to build links without having to touch absolute URLs. That means if the filename or path for a page changes, so will all the links. (YESSSSS.)

Am interested in hearing about your Marketing Workflows!

“In the retail business the more you can give value with products, with service and with image, the more you’re able to get in price,” Mr Meij told The Australian Financial Review Business Summit on Wednesday.

“As we develop our model from the analog world to the digital world … if we can continue to innovate in the eyes of the customer, innovate on price, service and image … it means we can get more for our products,” he said.

“Differentiation is the custodian of profit and we can create more value.”

… Spot on…