By 2019, it was operating in eight Indian metros, and by August 2021, it had expanded into quick commerce, launching Dunzo Daily to deliver essentials in 19 minutes or less. Customers liked the convenience that Dunzo provided, investors loved its growth, and the phrase 'Dunzo it' became a common idiom in India akin to 'Google it' in the U.S.
Design is a strategic lens—a way of seeing systems, solving problems, anticipating consequences, gleaning insights, and making decisions to ensure better outcomes for all stakeholders. As a function truly custom-built to navigate complexity, design trains its practitioners to synthesize competing inputs. It translates abstract goals into tangible outcomes and considers the needs of diverse user groups.
Heat looks like validation, and validation looks like safety. It is hard to ignore a sector when customers start leaning forward at the same time investors do. Still, the more cycles I have lived through in competitive technology businesses, the more I see heat as an optical illusion. It sharpens whatever is easiest to notice and blurs the underlying mechanics that determine who or what holds control.
People recognize polish, but they respond to purpose. What the industry is starting to learn is that value is in the principles those tools represent. Technology is initially and temporarily impressive, whereas values are unforgettable.
After relocating back to my home in the Midlands, I find clients are reluctant to look further afield than their back gardens. As a working-class creative, I understand that regional pride is something to be celebrated, but navel-gazing only contributes to the brain drain down the M1. When working with cultural clients, if I make reference to things from London or abroad, it's met with defensive disdain.
Developers spend more than 60% of their time debugging and maintaining code rather than building new features, Stack Overflow's Developer Survey reports. If you're running a software development team or building applications for your business, you can use Microsoft Visual Studio Pro to streamline coding workflows with an AI-enhanced development environment that reduces debugging time and accelerates deployment cycles. Best of all, Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2026 is currently available for only $49.99 (reg. $499.99).
Marie Swift, founder and CEO of Impact Communications, said the firm also emphasizes "credibility marketing," including being quoted in reputable industry outlets, publishing bylined articles, submitting for and winning awards, issuing news releases, speaking at conferences and appearing as guests on webinars and podcasts. "Social media is an amplification tool," she said. "It should not be the primary communication tool."
Search beyond major job engines by using niche job boards, Google X‑ray searches, industry trade directories, company filings, supplier and client lists, local business registers, conference speaker lists, and professional association directories; cross-reference these sources, build a prioritized spreadsheet, and set email or RSS alerts to track when small employers post trainee or entry-level opportunities, and monitor sector-specific hashtags and community Slack/Discord channels for unadvertised roles.
But if you're innovating within your industry, it's a problem you should expect and prepare for because it means having to operate in two realities-the internal reality where you know the challenges in your industry and how you're going to solve them, and the external reality where nobody else has recognized the problem that needs to be solved. In a highly regulated industry like healthcare, safety, and stability create an inertia that often works against innovation.
Pencil's experiment focused on written copy in Facebook product ads rather than big-budget creative. Despite widely held concerns that the tech could cannibalize copywriting jobs, that doesn't mean professional creatives are ignoring the tech. Shruthi Subramanian of Serviceplan Munich (above) was named the most-awarded copywriter in the world in The Drum's World Creative Rankings. She says the tools can be put to good use, albeit with caution.
Think about an employee who wants to improve their skills and knowledge. They work hard to grow both personally and professionally through continuous learning. Now, think about someone who doesn't want to change and sticks to their old habits. Who would be a better asset to your business? It's clear that staffers who focus on self-improvement are much more valuable. They contribute to a culture of learning and support leaders in growing the business steadily.
Spend half an hour exploring #StrategyTwitter or #MarketingTwitter and you'll quickly discover huge swathes of talented folks arguing passionately about the correct way to market brands. On one end of the spectrum you'll find the staunch strategists quoting lines from Sharp's How Brands Grow (which is well worth a read), while on the other end you'll find people posting fairly nauseating Gary Vaynerchuk quotes in serif fonts about how the number one rule in marketing is 'love'.
Traditional thought leadership is losing impact. Long reports and gated content no longer capture attention in today's zero-click world. As a result, thought leadership is entering a new phase - experiential thought leadership. Engaging formats like interactive webinars, immersive events and podcasts make ideas felt and memorable rather than just consumed. Success depends on cross-team collaboration, testing and building experiences around real audience understanding.
Identifying the best global expansion strategies isn't the only step AI companies should take to accelerate business growth and reach new audiences. It may be easier than ever to reach buyers on the other side of the world, but doing so brings its own set of challenges and hiccups. For starters, AI regulations differ by region, meaning that you have to know and abide by the rules in different regions.