A lesson in successful marketing and restoring consumer trust
Since its inception in 1993, Chipotle has grown to become one of the most popular fast-casual restaurants, successfully balancing the convenience of fast food with the quality of a casual, sit-down restaurant. Chipotle’s growth hasn’t been easy, though — over three years between 2015 and 2018, the company faced reports that consumers were contracting E. coli and norovirus after eating Chipotle. These scandals tainted the company’s reputation for a brief period, but the restaurant was able to restore consumer trust and continue growing.
What is Chipotle’s secret? Yes, good food attracts consumers, but most companies wouldn’t be able to survive…
And what’s holding them back from further growth
I recently wrote about Morning Brew, the newsletter that covers updates in the business and tech industry. Founded by two college students in 2015, Morning Brew grew rapidly and was sold in 2020 to Business Insider. The deal valued Morning Brew at $75 million.
Morning Brew is not the only newsletter founded in 2015 that has amassed widespread success. Another 2015-established newsletter, The Hustle, was recently acquired in a deal that valued the company at an estimated $27 million.
Sure, $27 million is a bit smaller than Morning Brew’s $75 million valuation. But if you were Sam Parr, the founder…
It’s time to wake up to everything around you
At the end of the day, do you find that you can’t remember what actually occurred within the past 24 hours?
You woke up, went to work, ate lunch at noon, worked some more, and then went home. You ate dinner, caught up on your favorite TV show, scrolled through social media for an hour, and then got ready for bed. The next morning, you woke up and began the same routine.
It’s easy to feel like you’re stuck in the same routine, doing the same thing over and over again. It happens to all of us. We become comfortable…
How nine years of innovation led to success
Chances are high that you didn’t know about Zoom one year ago.
Unless you’re a tech junkie who follows the market and watches IPOs carefully, you likely paid no attention when Zoom became a public company in April of 2019. Perhaps you read about Zoom on a finance article, perhaps you saw an advertisement about it on social media — but you probably did not truly know about it.
Until the pandemic began, of course.
In March of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread rapidly across the United States, Zoom suddenly emerged as the greatest technological marvel of…
What the numbers mean for investors.
After 10 years as a public company, Tesla finally posted its first annual profit in January of 2020.
Yes, you read that right. It took 10 years for the electric auto manufacturer to actually post a profit. For any other public company, a decade of failing to turn a profit would scare investors away. How can a company operate for 10 years without being profitable and still avoid bankruptcy?
For Elon Musk’s company, however, large investments into research and design were overlooked in the anticipation that such investments would pay off in the future. …
And the lessons that were learned
In the spring of 1951, a young student by the name of Warren Buffett entered a classroom at Columbia Business School. An avid reader, Buffett had spent many high school nights studying stocks, analyzing investments, and reading his favorite book — “The Intelligent Investor.”
Buffett must have been excited as he entered the classroom; Benjamin Graham, the author of “The Intelligent Investor,” was the one teaching the class at Columbia Business School.
In Buffett’s mind, Benjamin Graham was the greatest investor to ever live. …
How it can help your writing and career
It was the renowned writer Ray Bradbury who once told aspiring authors to “Read poetry every day of your life.” I know what you’re thinking. Poetry isn’t what you write. You write about fiction, non-fiction, history, technology, business, or humor. But you don’t write poetry.
And I get it. Poetry is something we read in high school literature class. It can seem archaic, stilted, or too flowery. It can seem fanciful — an enjoyable escape, perhaps, but a platform with little application to the real world. But regardless of your view on poetry, the medium holds many benefits for writers…
Start stepping into boldness
Audacity is a complicated word.
Let’s be honest, “audacity” has garnered a substantial amount of bad press in the English language. After all, how many times have you heard phrases like the ones below:
Can you believe he had the audacity to say that?
Did you see what she just did? The audacity of some people!
You’ve probably heard the phrases before. It’s even possible that you’ve said those phrases before. We tend to view audacity as a negative word, a feeling we associate with people who are rude, selfish, or impetuous.
But audacity means so much more.
Don’t believe…
It’s time to move past 2020.
If there is one thing we can all agree on, it is that 2020 was a strange year. There’s no reason to go into the details; we all experienced it together. The good, the bad, the different — it was all there in 2020.
Perhaps you accomplished something truly big in 2020. Maybe you wrote the novel you always hoped to write. Maybe you read the book you always planned on reading. Maybe you started the project you had been putting off for years.
Or maybe you became overwhelmed by 2020. Perhaps the weight of the year suffocated the plans…
What’s stopping you from being the main character?
Recently, I have been pondering an odd thought: what kind of story am I living?
The reason I say that the thought is “odd” is because we tend not to think of our lives as stories. We’re living non-fiction lives — which, interestingly enough, is something that we try to escape from. We watch television and movies, we scroll through social media, we daydream about the way that things could be. Some people turn to alcohol or drugs to escape from the realities that surround them.
So, if we’re trying to escape our non-fiction lives, what do I mean by…
Aaron Schnoor
Occasional Writer, Full-Time Student at Campbell University, and Editor of The Intelligence of Everything
