Competitive Advantage Champion™ is a book to help you develop and maintain a competitive advantage.

Hello! My name is Badis and I teach business owners about competitive advantage.

A startup founder recently posted a Medium article relating a very unusual bus ride. The founder was riding the bus home and holding a job interview on the phone at the same time. He was recruiting a marketing manager. As they talked on the phone, he started using sentences like “we need to convert people”, “we need to be radical and hit hard”, “it’s important that we have a precise target in mind”, “you should watch Oussama’s video”. Apparently his conversation was overheard and a few bus stops later, the police stopped the bus and arrested him. The police suspected…

Scientists were gathering in the overlit meeting room. Everyone was tense. The latests test results came in and they were not good.

The project’s code name was UK92480.

As they were going through the numbers again, some were wondering if the project would ever end. The lab had been pouring enormous resources to develop a drug for angina, and it had been failing. If they could come up with this drug, they would have a serious market potential.

Hundreds of thousands were suffering from angina every year. …

Memes are the product of the digital hive mind. Memes are images of the internet’s subconscious. If the internet was its own culture, memes are that culture’s artefacts.

Here is how to launch one.

1- First, understand the digital hive mind.

Every brain connected to the internet, is still a brain. We all share more or less the same brain. Now align millions of brains on the same network. Tune them in. Synchronise them. Give them the same information speed. And you get yourself a digital hive mind.

Memes are stimuli living on this network of brains. They trigger, stimulate, puzzle, excite our brains. …

Rating is now a cultural obsession.

I was raised in a time when most things didn’t get rated. You picked a restaurant because you knew it, or someone told you about it. Rating everything is new. I clearly see the value though. There are no unchartered territories anymore. Check the ratings, and don’t worry. You can chose “the best”.

Rating is a guiding system. A GPS. It’s also a marketing tool and a game more and more companies are playing. We seem to be rating everything, except… people.

The Chinese government is thinking about a rating system for their citizens…

You look at your dashboard. There are 5 different graphs. You click, analyze. You come back to your board everyday. You are responsible for that data on that dashboard. Everyday is the same dance.

Every marketer has a special relationship to data. I hardly know of any profession like this. Compulsively looking at real-time data is part of the job description. It can get unhealthy. It’s good to unplug sometimes. However, you’ll still obsess over the numbers. You need that marginal growth. You’ll do whatever it takes.

When you have it, boy,…That rush. It feels good. You want more. You…

There is something about this brand that talks to most of us. It’s your childhood. The classrooms, the late-night homework, the exams, the teachers writing on your copy, the slight pain on your finger after using their pen for hours. Growing up, it’s also the pen you use, lose and look for desperately on your desk when needed. It’s the emergency lighter you have for a smoke or a birthday party. Bic is part of our life.

This unusual company who also manufactures razors, perfumes, boats, surf boards, phones, funeral products started in a suburb of Paris. In 1945, Marcel…

Or should I say: Homo Sapiens is a marketer.

Homo Sapiens appeared 300,000 years ago and, since then, has conquered the world. Homo Sapiens invented the internet, railways, capitalism, the atomic bomb and formed the societies we live in.

This unprecedented conquest came because of major cognitive shifts. Understanding these cognitive shifts is essential in understanding ourselves. They are also essential in understanding society.

So, what is the relationship between these cognitive shifts brought by Homo Sapiens and the modern discipline of Marketing?

Marketing is a brand new discipline in the wide spectrum of human history. …