Playing to your strengths

For years, McDonald’s seemed to embody everything that was wrong with the American diet. The brand had become a symbol of food choices that were driving escalating rates of obesity and hypertension. The company spent more than a decade trying to fight this perception among American consumers by targeting them with messaging about its updated menu, which offered healthier alternatives more in line with contemporary diet trends — but to no avail. Then, instead of combating the opposition’s hate and attempting to win over those in the middle, McDonald’s decided to focus on its fans — the people who self-identify as McDonald’s devotees despite the vitriol directed at the brand. The result of this strategy was a 10.4pc increase in global revenue for McDonald’s from 2018 to 2021 and the return of dormant customers.

(Adapted from “The Myth of the Mainstream,” by Marcus Collins, published on July 24, 2023, by MIT Sloan Management Review)

Full-time children

Six months ago, Jia Zhang was still running her own small business in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. But it was hit hard by the pandemic, generating meagre profits compared with her efforts. Now she has a new job: working for her parents full time, just being their daughter. In exchange, they pay her 8,000 yuan ($1,115) a month, which is about the average salary in China. “My job is to spend time with my parents — for example, taking them to grocery stores — and do some household chores,” Zhang said. “Also, if my parents want to go out, I would make plans in advance, taking them to various stores.” In recent months, the hashtags #FullTimeDaughter and #FullTimeSon have been trending on Chinese social media platforms, attracting millions of views. They refer to adult children who, due to unemployment, are hired by their parents mainly to do housework and be on hand whenever needed.

(Adapted from “Facing job scarcity in China, some find work as ‘full-time children’,” by Larissa Gao and Zhenzhen Liu, published on July 24, 2023, by NBC News)

Google’s late entry to the AI train

In 2017, eight Googlers made one of the biggest discoveries in AI, designing what would become the ‘T’ in ChatGPT. They’ve all since left Google to build their own startups worth $4bn. Over five months, the team ran experiments and, not realising the magnitude of what they’d discovered, wrote their findings up in a research paper called “Attention is All You Need.” The result was a leap forward in artificial intelligence and has since been cited more than 80,000 times by other researchers. The architecture they designed underpinned OpenAI’s ChatGPT (the “T” stands for Transformer) and image-generating tools like Midjourney and more. In a way, Google became a victim of its own success. The company was already using cutting-edge AI techniques to process text, and the mindset among many researchers was, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

(Adapted from “Meet the $4 Billion AI Superstars That Google Lost, by Parmy Olson,” published on July 13, 2023, by Bloomberg)

Killing the bird worth billions

It’s rare for corporate brands to become so intertwined with everyday conversation that they become verbs. It’s rarer still for the owner of such a brand to announce plans to intentionally destroy it. On Sunday, in the middle of a quiet summer weekend, Elon Musk decreed that Twitter’s product name would be changed to “X” and that he is getting rid of the bird logo and all the associated words, including “tweet.” Musk’s move wiped out anywhere between $4bn and $20bn in value, according to analysts and brand agencies. “It took 15-plus years to earn that much equity worldwide, so losing Twitter as a brand name is a significant financial hit,” said Steve Susi, director of brand communication at Siegel & Gale.

(Adapted from “Twitter Turning Into X Set to Kill Billions in Brand Value,” by Aisha Counts and Jesse Levine, published on July 25, 2023, by Bloomberg)

Published in Dawn, The Business and Finance Weekly, July 31st, 2023