Business Glossary.
The strategy, marketing and operations concepts that show up over and over in our case studies — explained in plain English, with real examples from real companies.
Finance
Marketing
FOMO Marketing
Marketing that triggers a fear of missing out — usually through artificial scarcity, urgency, or social proof — to drive immediate action.
Category Creation
Building a new market category — and the language that goes with it — so that the company is the default answer to a question customers didn't know to ask before.
Loss Leader
A product deliberately sold at or below cost to attract customers who will then buy other, profitable items in the same store, app or ecosystem.
Operations
Strategy
Network Effect
A product where each new user makes the product more valuable for every other user.
Moat
A structural advantage that lets a company defend its profits against competitors over the long term.
Cooperative Business Model
A business owned and democratically controlled by the people who use it (customers), supply it (producers), or work in it (workers).
Innovator's Dilemma
Big, well-run companies often fail at obvious technology shifts because the rational thing for their best customers and quarterly earnings is to ignore the shift until it's too late.
Switching Cost
The total cost — financial, time, retraining, data migration, risk — that a customer takes on when they leave a product for a competitor.
Winner-Takes-All Market
A market structure where the top player captures most of the profit and value, leaving runners-up with marginal share and chronic losses.
First-Mover Advantage
The structural benefit of being the first company in a new market — through brand, customer learning, supply lock-up, or network effects — before competitors arrive.