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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

A speakers bureau that represents the best original thinkers,
writers, and doers for speaking engagements.

The Rise of Convenience Maximalism: The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson Explores the Meal- Delivery Industry

In 2015, for the first time ever, Americans spent more money in restaurants than they did in grocery stories. Now, the food industry is preparing for yet another major shift: by 2020, an estimated half of restaurant spending will occur “off premises.” Deliveries, drive-throughs, and takeaway meals are poised to takeover sit down dining. Derek Thompson explores the rise of meal-delivery services for The Atlantic.  

Quick-service chains like McDonalds and Sweet Green seem to be exploding, with a new location popping up on every corner—but nowhere in the food industry is experiencing growth quite like online delivery, Atlantic writer Derek Thompson reports. In fact, online delivery now accounts for a whopping 5-10 percent of restaurant business.

 

As a result, venture capitalist funds are flowing into meal delivery companies despite many of them, including DoorDash and UberEats, reporting negative earnings. “Is the meal-delivery boom actually a bubble, ready to pop?” wonders Thompson. While there have been plenty of ethical, ecological, and economic concerns raised about these companies, they continue to persist because of another trend: lack of time. Millennials not only spend more time working and commuting, but also more time streaming TV. The sit down restaurant experience has been replaced by a streamlined, hyper-efficienct meals.

 

“Meal-delivery companies are a symbol of what might be the most powerful force in business today: convenience maximalism,” Thompson writes. “The through line that connects the surge of e-commerce and online delivery (and practically every thriving digital business) is the triumph of consumer ease and logistical immediacy, in every arena of life.”

 

You can read the full article here.

 

Interested in learning more about speaker Derek Thompson? Contact a sales agent at The Lavin Agency for information on how to book him for your next event.

Future Fest 2018, Jeremy Gutsche’s 3-Day Epic Innovation Conference, Is Underway

Future Festival 2018 Toronto—a three-day conference where the world’s best innovators gather to prototype their future—is happening now. JEREMY GUTSCHE, veteran Lavin keynote speaker and the festival’s founder and host, is also the CEO of TrendHunter.com: the #1 most powerful, predictive, and popular trend platform in the world.

“The reason why,” says Gutsche, “is that we use big data from 150 million people to be more predictive about finding better ideas, faster—like a giant innovation focus group.” Which isn’t a bad description of Future Fest, either: a gathering of unique minds and creators, experiencing the future together, workshopping actual problems and coming away with real, actionable solutions. It’s “choreographed for engagement,” he says, “an experience unlike anything an insight leader has ever been a part of before. That’s Future Fest.”

 

97% of attendees rate it the best innovation conference they’ve been to, 85% rate it the best business event across all categories, and the praise from representatives of top brands is practically endless. Gutsche helps innovators, entrepreneurs and dreamers connect the dots and make their small ideas big.

 

The Lavin Agency represents speakers at the cutting edge of their field. To book Jeremy Gutsche or another innovation speaker, like Adam Alter or Amber Mac, contact us today. 

Introducing New Speaker Markus Giesler: One of the World’s Most Influential Consumer Sociologists

“The winner with consumers will always be whoever has the best strategy for managing the cultural, ethical and political factors of their innovation,” says Markus Giesler—one of the 40 Best Business Professors Under 40 and an incredibly influential consumer sociologist and ethnographer.

Markus Giesler teaches the world’s first MBA course on Customer Design Experience and is director of the Big Design Lab, a think tank that examines market-level design questions with public and private organizations. He encourages audiences to approach innovation, particularly consumer innovation, as though it were a social system. “Culture is probably the most underestimated success factor in business,” he says. The way that a product, like ride-sharing for example, is received, viewed, absorbed; the way that it affects other players within the the space it’s entering, is as important as the product itself. 

 

In talks, Giesler shows how our choices, preferences and goals as consumers are never natural, but rather embedded in systems of people and things, carefully constructed to support a particular idea or innovation. It’s the marketer’s job to properly recognize, navigate, and in some cases create these systems, says Giesler, and he can help you do it. 

 

The Secret to Bird Feeding | Markus Giesler | TEDxYorkU

 

To book Markus Giesler, or another marketing or disruption speaker for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency today.