Killing the Cat

Humans are visually oriented. Written language is only about 5,000 years old, and the printing press is less than 600 years old, but visual communication via drawn or painted images dates back to our Neanderthal ancestors.

We process visual information about 60,000 times faster than we do words. Researchers at MIT once estimated that the human brain can correctly identify an image in as little as 13 milliseconds.

Those companies and others took dollars out of advertising and put them into making better products and getting them to customers faster and cheaper than their competitors. Amazon didn’t win e-commerce with a marketing campaign; it won by doing the hard work of guaranteeing free delivery in 48 hours. Others have won by going asset light: Nvidia uses suppliers for all of its manufacturing; Shein, the fastest-growing apparel company in the world, has no stores and no warehouses.