Ideas

Get new ideas, stories and articles on progressive capitalism in a short, weekly email. Enter your email here.


    This is stored in Mailchimp and will only be used to send you this newsletter.

    Category:

    All Brands are Monopolies

    December 8, 2020 in Competition

    Put yourself in the shoes of an advertising executive at Coca Cola.

    If the average consumer says “I want a cola”, then they have many options available to them and you will have to compete for their custom.

    If, however, that customer says “I want a Coke”, well then you are the sole-provider of that product. For that person, at that time, you have no competition. You have the monopoly.

    This is the ultimate goal of all brand advertising – to create monopolies. Not to compete better, to advertise a cheaper price or a better flavour, but to distinguish a brand above and beyond competition.

    The Long and The Short of It“, a seminal work on Branding, compiled data from thousands of companies running thousands of different ad campaigns.

    Many ad campaigns that offered discounts and coupons, or focused on getting people in the doors or promoted specific product features, had short term effects, selling more items by competing better.

    But the best ad campaigns were longer-term “branding” campaigns, which made emotional connections with consumers and moved the brand out of a competitive space in their mind.

    The authors measured this by looking at price sensitivity. Companies who did this Brand building work were able to charge higher prices, because they invested in creating brand monopolies.

    I don’t want a smartphone, I want an iPhone.

    I don’t want a cola, I want a Coke.

    I don’t want an electric car, I want a Tesla.

    Capitalists Hate Competition

    December 7, 2020 in Competition

    Open any basic economics textbook and it will tell you that a cornerstone of capitalism is competition. “Competition is the other vital attribute of a capitalist systemsays Investopedia, for example.

    Competitive markets make businesses work harder to produce goods and services for us at better prices. That’s fairly simple “capitalism 101.”

    The most famous and wealthy capitalists, however, seem to be making their reputation and wealth by doing precisely the opposite – by seeking rarely to compete.

    Warren Buffett, for example, is an intelligent, well-respected, genial billionaire investor. On a personal level, I’m a big fan. But does his brand of capitalism promote or hinder competitive markets?

    One of his most famous pearls of wisdom is that investors should always look for companies with strong “economic moats”. His term to mean companies who are protected from competition in ways that will last a long time.

    Peter Thiel, a founder of Paypal, Palantir and early investor in Facebook echoes a similar sentiment in starker terms. “Competition is for losers” he says, in his book “Zero to One,” instructing entrepreneurs that their goal should not be to compete, but to create monopolies.

    From their perspective, this approach is logical. Competition competes away profits, putting that money back in the pockets of consumers. That’s why we like competition in the system, but why capitalist themselves (i.e. allocators of wealth) don’t.

    In Capitalism, people like Buffett and Thiel are heavily incentivised to break competition.

    Indeed, this is the entire business model of Silicon Valley venture capital which has created the first public trillion dollar companies. The entire model is based around the idea of finding and creating natural monopolies with network effects.

    If our economic theory has a notion that competitive markets, as envisioned by Capitalism, are good, then it is always worth remembering that successful wealth accumulators within many markets will almost always be attempting to subvert competition.

    The ones that avoid competition the best generally be the ones that accumulate the most wealth. This is one of the key tensions at the very core of Capitalism.

    Introducing – Capitalism Reframed

    December 7, 2020 in General

    I am a Capitalist….. I think?

    I used to be more certain about that a decade ago, but recently I’ve been having doubts.

    Since the Great Recession I’ve been watching many of the failings of modern Capitalism become apparent, unravel with disastrous effect and be widely debated, discussed and dissected.

    I’ve seen solutions offered by nationalists and populists which have horrified centrists like me, but against which we have done very little to effectively counter.

    I have seen more hopeful, optimistic solutions offered by those to my left. Almost all of their diagnoses I agree with, many of their social solutions I agree with too, but some of the economic proposals don’t seem like the right way to achieve those goals.

    Further to the left still is a growing popularity for ideas whose time I thought was past – removing private property, deploring monetary incentives and empowering authoritarian states.

    I am mostly worried by what I haven’t seen – a compelling new narrative emerging from the centre. Either from where I sit on the centre-left, with European Social Democrats who are failing to muster any enthusiasm, or from those on the centre-right, who I don’t even know how to describe any more.

    Even more worrying still, is that I haven’t seen much of the important work that needs to get done before new narratives emerge – a deep analysis of the flaws of our system. What did “The Third Way” get wrong? What assumptions were incorrect? What optimism was misplaced?

    The current state of affairs is as much a failing of Third Way as it is of Neoliberalism. Spending our time telling Socialists why we think they’re wrong is not a productive use of anybody’s time. Maybe it’s their turn to ask us for a coherent philosophy that they can critique?

    My firm belief is that there is valuable wheat but also a considerable amount of chaff in how we think and talk about modern Capitalism. Without doing the heavy lifting of sorting out the two, we risk re-creating a progressive Economic philosophy that will resonate with nobody and, more importantly, will still be full of incorrect ideas.

    That is the goal behind Capitalism Reframed. Every day for the next 100 days there will be a new article with an idea, a concept, a challenge or a story. I aim to ask difficult questions about how we talk about Capitalism, to return us to first principles and to give us space to re-think them in light of all the things we now know.

    If you believe that competitive markets, individual incentives, money, prices and other tools of Capitalism will play an important role in our collective future prosperity, then we need to revisit the first principles of Capitalism and re-write the tenets of a moderate, progressive economic philosophy.

    Every week will focus on a new theme. This week our theme is Competition. It is a cornerstone of capitalist theory, but as today’s first article notes, most capitalists are actively trying to circumvent it. Competition is healthy for for companies, but it’s exhausting for people. Is “you will live your life in constant competition” a compelling economic philosophy? Is it what we want?

    Check in each day for a new article, or subscribe to the weekly newsletter which will summarise the week’s theme and link to the key ideas.