Lessons About Markets From Wayne Gretzky…

Wayne Gretzky was arguably one of the best ice hockey players of all time.

He said:

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been”.

This is useful to you as a brand, but I need to give some context to make it relevant, first…

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012.

Facebook did the same with WhatsApp in 2014.

In 2016 Facebook thought about buying Musical.ly (which is now rebranded as TikTok).

It was reported that Facebook walked away because of Chinese ownership and the underage demographic.

Two years later, in 2018, Facebook later launched a rival TikTok app called Lasso, likely because they thought they the missed Musical.ly opportunity.

TikTok has turned into a trojan horse that will be “on overnight sensation”, years in the making.

Facebook has a history of pursuing and buying companies that know where the world is going and has a large enough user based, not because the tech is hard to build.

Just like Instagram (Zuckerberg owned) usurped Snapchats glory but copying their ephemeral stories feature and thus dragged all the userbase off Snapchat to Instagram, Google is trying the same with “Google Shorts” and TikTok (https://www.theinformation.com/articles/youtube-plans-shorts-to-rival-tiktok)

Who knows who will win this arms race, but what is becoming clear is people are over the fake curated crap that Instagram promotes and are moving to the new form of content that is short authentic video.

And if you want to know where consumers attention is going, all you have to do is watch those like Facebook Inc.

There are only a few ways to predict the future and one of those is having an informational advantage over the rest of the market.

That comes from deep industry insights.

So, watch the features or the companies those who know consumer behaviour really well are copying or buying and jump in first.