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Andrew Chen recently delivered a keynote at StartCon in Australia called: What’s Next in Growth? You can find his entire talk, here, on his blog.
One of the themes of his talk is that, “technology changes, but people stay the same.” I like that. See above.
But more specifically, his presentation focuses on 3 techniques for growing businesses and products: customer referrals, viral content, and bootstrapping marketplaces. All of it is interesting, but I’m particularly fascinated by the last one.
Marketplaces are all around us. Uber is a marketplace that pairs drivers and riders. Bars are a marketplace that try to pair people together. Finding, trading, and transacting (whatever that might mean for the marketplace in question) seems so fundamental to humans. And cities really empower that.
The challenge with marketplaces is that they’re hard to start. There’s always a chicken-and-egg problem and so one side of the marketplace usually needs to be “hacked” at the beginning.
Uber is a perfect example of this. At the outset, it didn’t have enough liquidity in its marketplace to compete with incumbent taxis. That is, it took longer to get an Uber than to get a taxi.
So instead, the value proposition was not about speed (or cheapness); it was about luxury. Uber was “everyone’s private driver.” That made waiting acceptable. You were getting a different level of service. The first Uber I ever called in Toronto took 20 minutes to get to my place in midtown.
But obviously as liquidity increased, Uber was able to move downmarket and capture more (most) of the taxi market. Marketplaces are powerful once they get going. Network effects.
I say all of this because, as many of you know, I have spent a lot of time wondering about the future of real estate marketplaces.
At the same time, I also think that many of these seemingly tech-focused lessons could be applied to cities. Starting an online marketplace is difficult. So is building a new neighborhood from scratch. In the end, it’s always about people.
Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.
With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:
Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
People: Immigration and diversity of a city
Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online
What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:
“Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”
This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.
The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?
Max Galka has created an incredible visualization of country-to-country net migration (from 2010 to 2015) on his blog, Metrocosm.
Here’s a screenshot:
But you really need to view the full screen interactive version.
In that version, you can hover over a country to see the total net migration number (+/-) and you can click on a country to see where people are moving to and from. A blue circle indicates positive net migration (greater inflows) and a red circle indicates negative net migration (greater outflows).
All of the data is from the United Nations Population Division. And though the numbers are estimates, it’s a fascinating look at global migration. For instance, look at the outflow from Syria.
It would also be interesting to see these numbers on a per capita basis because some countries certainly punch above or below their weight in terms of migration. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of Canada and Australia vis-à-vis the US.
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