Wrigley's new expensive chewing gum has hit the UK and as it is summer holiday time I was in the company of a big group of teenagers yesterday who were all raving about the gum and its 97p price point. "The flavour really lasts longer," one teenager assured me as his pals looked on in agreement. Who am I to argue? In store last week, my five-year-old was looking for batteries for his torch and picked up a packet of gum suggesting these could be batteries. I mentioned this and the teenagers said the packaging was really cool. If you had asked me last week, the UK chewing gum market seemed pretty crowded before this launch. If you asked me today, I would say the manufacturer has found a niche. My advice to local shopkeepers is to support everything launched by a major manufacturer (provided it fits your store profile) as you have nothing to lose.
“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
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