Because the company — which sells $7B+ of energy drinks a year — is a pure marketing firm (outsources all production).
Its invested $2B+ into F1 but has gained multiples of that for the brand by "manufacturing history".
Here’s a breakdown🧵
1/ Red Bull. Everyone's favorite concoction of sugar, B-vitamins, taurine and caffeine.
Today, it sells ~8B cans a year and is the market leader in what is a $50B+ energy drink market.
So, how is it *only* a marketing company?
2/ Red Bull makes nothing. Production is outsourced to Rauch, an Austrian bottler.
The drink blend is not proprietary (vs. Coke, which has a secret recipe).
So it spends ALOT on marketing (~35% of sales) to differentiate the brand; way more than Coca-Cola (9%) and Pepsi (7%).
3/ The Red Bull corporate structure was created by Dietrich Mateschitz and Chaleo Yoovidhya.
Mateschitz was an Austrian marketing exec who often travelled to Thailand. There, he fell in love with an energy drink called Krating Daeng (created by Yoovidhya, a Thai pharmacist).
4/ In 1982, Mateschitz proposed a deal to Yoovidhya.
Each man put up $500k to create a new entity called Red Bull GmbH to sell the energy drink to the West (each owned 49%, w/ Yoovidhya's sons owning 2%).
Mateschitz handled marketing/distribution while Yoovidhya made the drink.
5/ When Red Bull officially launched in 1987, Mateschitz flexed the brand's now-famous marketing chops.
He positioned it as an upscale beverage: the can was thinner and pricier than Coke.
The energy-inducing properties were a big hit in student party scenes and extreme sports.
6/ In 1989, Red Bull made its first F1 sponsorship w/ Ferrari driver Gerbard Berger.
(Mateschitz grew up an F1 fan, cheering for Jochen Rindt, a German race champion who competed with an Austrian license and died in a car crash in 1970).
7/ In 1995, Mateschitz took it one step further by buying a majority stake in the Sauber F1 racing team.
But in 2001, Mateschitz fell out w/ Sauber partners when they chose Kimi Raikkonen over a Red Bull-trained racer.
He sold his stake and set out to own 100% of an F1 team.
8/ An opportunity soon arose: in 2004, Mateschitz bought Jaguar F1 racing for $1.
Why so cheap? He had to commit $400m to improve the team over the following 3 years.
The team was renamed Red Bull Racing and, in 2005, it made Christian Horner the team head (and he remains).
9/ Enter Sebastian Vettel.
Discovered by Red Bull at age 12 (1999), he trained under Helmut Marko, Mateschitz's friend, former racer and legendary talent spotter.
With Vettel at the wheel, Red Bull won 4 straight F1 titles (2010-2013).
10/ Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton dominated F1 over the following 8 years.
But, of course, Max Verstappen just won the 2021 F1 title in a Red Bull car.
Is the F1 investment actually worth it for Mateschitz and Red Bull, though? Why not just advertise on the cars, instead of own?
11/ Brand exposure
Forbes says that Mateschitz invested $2.3B into Red Bull through its first 14 years.
Over that span, Red Bull Racing is estimated to have created $300m+ a year in brand exposure ($5B+ total).
That's more than a 2x return on investment.
12/ Manufacturing History
Even more than brand exposure, Red Bull Racing creates history, which ultimately reduces customer acquisition costs b/c:
◻️Fandom is heritable through generations
◻️Winning creates mythology around product
◻️Constant exposure creates deep affection
13/ A stable of sports teams
In fact, Red Bull "manufactures history" across many sports:
◻️6 soccer teams (RB Leipzig, NY Red Bulls, RB Salzburg, RB Ghana, RB Brasil)
◻️2 F1 teams (RB Racing and Scuderia AlphaTauri)
◻️ Other (E-sports, hockey, sailing, skateboarding, NASCAR)
14/ In 2012, Red Bull "manufactured history" another way. It paid for Felix Baumgartner (Austrian skydiver) to set the record for a high-altitude jump (128k ft).
The plan took 7yrs + cost $50m. But created $6B in brand exposure!
So, yeah, Red Bull is a (great) marketing firm.
15/ If you enjoyed that, I write interesting threads 1-2x a week.
Def follow @TrungTPhan to catch them in your feed.
16/ PS. I also write a weekly newsletter that rounds up hilarious memes and tweets on trending tech, business and internet topics trungphan.substack.com
If you are the person that did the un-aligned letters for the previous eBay logo, please contact the research app team. We are huge fans of how un-aligned the “e” is with the “y”.Bearly.AI
This article offers up reasons for popularity of simple font logos (mostly Sans Serif):
— Easier to standardize ads across mediums
— Improves readability (especially on mobile)
— The “brand” matters more than the logo velvetshark.com/why-do-brands-…
Berkshire Hathaway board member Chris Davis once asked Charlie Munger why Costco didn’t drop the membership card.
Let anyone shop and raise prices by 2% (still great value), thus making up for lost membership fees (and more).
Munger said the card is important filter:
▫️“Think about who you’re keeping out [with a membership card]. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken.
Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize [the value]…that cohort will have a 100% of your shoplifters and a 100% of your thieves. Now, it’ll also have most of your small tickets.
And that cohort relative to the US population will probably be shrinking as a % of GDP relative to the people that can do the math [on Costco’s value].”▫️
I have a membership but have been guffing on the math for a few years tbh. They keep telling me to upgrade from Gold to Business but I’m too lazy (even if the 2-3% Cash Back on Business pays back after a few trips).
This is a long way of saying Costco’s membership price hike effective today — its first in 7 years — is annoying but when I decide to do the math in a few months, it’ll be worth it.
Anyway, here is something I wrote about Costco’s $9B+ clothing business my affinity for Kirkland-branded socks and Puma gym shirts. readtrung.com/p/costcos-9b-c…
Two notes:
▫️Meant “Executive” (not “Business”) membership
▫️Chris Davis was doing a pure thought experiment. Costco membership obvi high margin (on~$5B a year) and accounts for majority of Costco profits. Retail margin is tiny on ~$230B of annual sales (Costco would need like another $150B+ from letting anyone shop to make up membership profits)
One of the Team USA rowers who won a Gold Medal is an investment banker and actually did the “B2B SaaS Sales” joke on Linkedin. Legend.
Here’s the rest of the post (perfectly formatted to show up in the feed as a shitpost): linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…
Justin if you’re reading this and are available for consulting, the research app team would love to engage your B2B SaaS knowledge for our Q4 sales roadmapBearly.AI
The amount of work Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli team put into a film is mind-boggling.
Each typically has 60k-70k frames, all hand-drawn and painted with water color.
This 4-second clip (“The Wind Rises”) took one animator 15 months to do. Insane.
The docu “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki” shows him talking to the animator (Eiji Yamamori) after its done.
It’s so good:
Miyazaki: “Good job.”
Yamamori: “It’s so short, though”
Miyazaki: “But it was worth it.”
The animator gets a second of joy (he’s pumped) but on to the next.
Miyazaki doesn’t use digital FX or computer graphics. He believes “that the tool of an animator is the pencil.”
On a related note, here’s something I wrote about another Japanese legend dedicated to the craft (Ichiro Suzuki) and the art of mastery: readtrung.com/p/jerry-seinfe…
New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street.
The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”.
Some highlights:
▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags placed directly on the curb.”
▫️Two main types of containerization: 1) individual bins for low density locales; 2) shared containers for high-density.
▫️NYC needs to clean up 24,000,000lbs of garbage a day
▫️Containerization has only become the norm worldwide in major cities in the past 15 years.
▫️New York City first considered containerization in the 1970s but never conducted a feasibility study until now (Mckinsey’s sales team has been dropping the ball)
▫️Key considerations for container viability:
• POPULATION DENSITY: NYC has 30k residents per square mile (more dense than comparable big cities)
• BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Few places to “hide” containers due to history of infrastructure development.
• WEATHER: Snow creates challenges for “mechanized collection” in the winter.
• CURB SPACE: Mostly taken up by bus stops, bike lanes, outdoor dining and fire hydrants.
• COLLECTION FREQUENCY: NYC needs to double frequency of pick-up for estimated speed of trash that bins would accumulate.
• FLEET: A new garbage truck will needs to be designed to collect rolling bins at scale.
▫️ The proposed solution (literally garbage bins and shared containers) covers 89% of NYC streets and 77% of residential tonnage.
▫️The three case studies — because you gotta have solid case studies — are Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.
▫️There is a slide called “Why containerization matters” and three reasons are “rats”, “pedestrian obstruction” and “dirty streets” (the 21-year intern that did this slide billed at prob $10k an hour is my hero).
The study is actually pretty interesting.
I have no idea if $4m is a rip-off to learn that “yeah, we should put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it” but I would have happily done it for 10-20% of that budget (and come to a similar conclusion).
It is actually an interesting deck. Just the thought of a 20-year old newly grad getting billed at an obscene rate to say”rats get to garbage” is kinda funny
Four more solid slides:
— By the numbers (daily garbage = 140 Statue of Liberty a day!!)
— City comparison
— Container comparison (looks like they did select the “scalable” trash bin)
— Curb side analysis
Think Mckinsey telling NY to “put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it and people can walk” will work out better than when it told AT&T in 1981 that cellphones would be “niche.”