The case of collaborative consumption.
An old trend that is new again.
Rachel made it clear that interaction via collaborative consumption moves so fast because it’s not inventing anything new – it’s just re-inventing what we’ve always done. “Sharing assets is prehistoric, innate behaviour. This is what we’ve been doing for thousands of years. When people say ‘why is this happening so fast?’, it’s partly because technology is enabling something very innate to us. It’s not something we have to learn or be convinced by, we just have to have the technology to make it easy.”
“Adidas’ Adipure Trainer,” minimalist shoes.
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The target market
Minimal shoes are one of the fast-growing categories in athletic footwear, with sales more than doubling in the past year to roughly $750 million. By billing the shoe as a gym trainer, Adidas could appeal to treadmill automatons, run-of-the-mill gym rats, and the requisite gear-fetishizing dentist who’s got to have a new pair of anything and everything.
Almost Genius: Adidas’s Barefoot Shoe for “Natural” Gym Workouts
“The making of an emerging market champion,” an interview with CEO of Groupo Bimbo.
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Groupo Bimbo is the world’s largest baker. Interesting take on growing business: because of the country’s economic hardships in the past, they tend to take a longer view of things. They try to look at market at regional basis. Trying to find the needs of a particular market.
Few companies from emerging markets have grown into successful multinational enterprises. One business that has is the packaged-goods company Grupo Bimbo. Founded in Mexico in 1945 by Lorenzo Servitje, the publicly traded company now holds the title of the world’s largest baker, with sales exceeding $10 billion in 2010. Just over half of those sales came from outside its home market—namely China; many Latin American countries, including Argentina and Brazil; and the United States. The company trades under several well-known brands, including Entenmann’s and Thomas’ in the United States, and the ubiquitous Bimbo brand in Latin America.
