👾 Leveling Up 👾

Welcome to Leveling Up. Today’s newsletter is a 4-minute read. 

Here are some things we’re going to cover: 

• GPT-4o and everything it can do

• How Ferrari creates a ‘dream’ product

• The gutsy gamble of Amazon Prime

Need to hit some new growth goals?

Request one from our marketing experts for free here (link).

Thanks,

Eric Siu :)

Actionable Tip

GPT-4o is the hottest update in AI right now.

Image generation has had a huge upgrade.

Here are 8 ways that you can generate new visual concepts (link)

Links You Might Like

Here are some of the best links I’ve found since our last email. 

💌 Email

10 cognitive biases that people can’t help (link)

🖊️ Writing

Why book writing sucks (link)

📈 SEO

Google’s SGE results are changing (link)

🤖 AI

GPT-4o is out now – here’s what it can do (link)

📊 Marketing

How Ferrari creates a ‘dream’ product (link)

Deep Dive: The Story of Amazon Prime

Here's a little story about the genius of Jeff Bezos pushing to launch Amazon Prime.

Around 2002, Amazon was growing very quickly as an online retailer. Leading up to the holiday season, Bezos declared that Amazon needed to launch a new low-priced offering by their Q4 public performance update (which happens towards the end of Q1).

The team was puzzled -- why was Jeff asking to launch this new thing when they were about to be extremely busy for the holidays?

It's because Amazon's MoM growth rate was actually decelerating. While the YoY growth looked impressive, Amazon was losing ground to its competitors and needed to do something different to set itself apart from its competitors.

The Amazon team jumped into research mode and eventually settled on free 2-day shipping and called it 'Prime'. The bet was that Prime would cause customers to buy more and stay loyal to the Amazon brand. 

It might seem like an obvious move looking backward, but a lot of time and resources went into settling on this as the strategic bet.

This move was extremely gutsy because it was one of those bets where you wouldn't be able to see the return on investment for years. But it was also a necessary bet to preserve their competitive edge. 

Missing bets like these are akin to Kodak missing the transition to digital cameras or Nokia missing on mobile.

What kind of long-term bet can you be making to get or maintain an edge over your competitors today? 

How can you zig where other people are zagging in an increasingly competitive world?

How I Can Help You

If you enjoy this newsletter and would like to collaborate with me, there are a few options available:

1. You can apply to work with my agency (link)

2. You can join my Skool community (link)

3. You can apply to join my mastermind (link)

Interested in working at Single Grain? We have some new open roles:

• Paid Media Manager (link)

• SEO Manager (link)