In the age of social media, how do you value your fans?
John Quelch said that social media has many marketing challenges, and how to value fans is a big issue. Thinking from a marketing perspective, focus on strong and weak ties. You might think that close friends with strong ties have the greatest marketing impact, but studies have found that this is not the case. The greater impact is on people who are more distant from you.
Speaker | John Quelch
(Professor at Harvard Business School, former Dean of London Business School and Deputy Dean of China Europe International Business School)
Thank you so much for coming back on Sunday morning, and for those of you who are entrepreneurs, or aspiring entrepreneurs, I have a special talk for you today.
Many entrepreneurs do not have a well-defined vision, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.
To start a business, you must plan well
Today will start with the topic of startup marketing, including how you can survive and succeed. Startup marketing involves four key areas that you must plan well:
Have the right target customers and end users.
We need the right products and services
To have a very good team of talents, enabling business ideas to be realized.
It is necessary to have good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.
So, what is entrepreneurial marketing?
One, it's reverse engineering from vision to action.
When Starbucks had only five stores, the founders had a vision to make Starbucks the third place in your life.
For entrepreneurs, start with a vision and reverse engineer it backwards: see what actions are required to achieve the vision. Many entrepreneurs do not have a good definition of the final vision, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.
Second, rapid cycle, low-cost trials to provide evidence
When you have a vision, think about how to do some quick, low-cost experiments to test the idea and prove to partners, customers, etc. that it is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term achievements as evidence.
Third, jointly develop with forward-looking customers
Most customers are conservative and don't want to waste time on new companies. You have to find forward-thinking customers who are willing to take risks on you. They may be small emerging customers, not good foundation customers in the market you want to enter.
Fourth: Create a comprehensive roadmap for small-step running
This includes creating a product roadmap, customer map, partner roadmap, and talent roadmap. Entrepreneurs should have a one-year or even three-year roadmap to see how you want the company to progress in these four dimensions.
For example?
In the late 1990s, John Osher invented the SpinBrush, a low-cost electric toothbrush, because he realized there was a big gap in the market: two dollars for a manual toothbrush and 50 dollars for an electric toothbrush. But there was no middle product in between.
He wanted to develop a toothbrush that cost somewhere in between. He considered the performance criteria for the success of a new toothbrush:
It is better to clean than a manual toothbrush, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price.
The built-in battery can last for three months. If you have to change the battery every week, it will collapse;
There is a trial feature in the package, and everyone is willing to see how the toothbrush rotates after starting;
The retail price is less than $6.
His positioning for the new toothbrush is that it is a better manual toothbrush, rather than a cheaper electric toothbrush.
For consumers, it went from two dollars to six dollars, rather than 50 dollars to six dollars. Because if it were the latter, the retailer would feel lost: the consumer only paid six dollars, instead of 50 dollars before. But now, the consumer went from spending two dollars to spending six dollars.
So the entrepreneur has to think not only about the end user, but also how to make more money from the distributor, because you have to go through them to get the product to the end customer. A good positioning statement is very important when defining the competition. In the end, he sold the company to Procter & Gamble, making a total of 480 million dollars.
You see, it's actually very simple because he has a lot of consumer insights and fills the market gap that no one sees.
Let's take another example.
The founder of this company, Intuit, discovered 20 years ago that many people had to fill out a tax return every year when dealing with their own taxes, which was very troublesome.
Intuit was the first company to develop personal finance software, especially for tax management, for both individuals and small businesses. But this easy-to-use software package, I don't know where to sell it, and no one believed it would work.
Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get the distributors for your new product. They distribute so many things that they don't have time to spend five hours checking if your unknown product will work.
Finally, he directly assured the consumer that if you buy this product and don't learn how to use it within six minutes, the money will be returned to you, and the product will also be given to you.
Besides refunding, what else did they do differently?
With the buyer's permission, follow the buyer to observe his first use process.
All executives in the company must spend two hours a month providing technical support to customers, listening to their problems.
Technical support for Client Server is a necessary path for promotion in the company.
Read the client's letter aloud in front of all executives, whether it's thanks or accusations.
This allows them to generate 50% of their sales from word-of-mouth and 20% from technical support referrals.
"The intersection of what customers really want and what technology can really do well - that's where true greatness is found."
"No matter what we do, we always have customers."
- ScottCook (founder of Intuit)