In the age of social media, how do you value your fans?
Release time：2018-06-01 page views： Font size：big In the small
John Quelch says 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 research has found that this is not the case. The bigger impact is actually with people who are more distant from you.
Speaker | John Quelch
(Harvard Business School professor, former dean of London Business School, associate dean of China Europe International Business School)
Thank you very much for coming back to my lecture on Sunday morning. For you entrepreneurs, or those who aspire to become entrepreneurs, I have a special lecture prepared today.
Many entrepreneurs do not define the final vision well, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.
Entrepreneurial marketing, you must plan well
Today will start with the topic of entrepreneurial marketing, including how you can survive and succeed. Entrepreneurial marketing includes four key areas that you must plan well:
Have the right target customers and end users;
Have the right products and services
Have a very good team of talents, so that the business idea can be realized;
Have good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.
So, what is entrepreneurial marketing??
First, this is a reverse engineering design from vision to action
When Starbucks only had 5 stores, the founder had a vision to make Starbucks the third space in your life.
For entrepreneurs, start with the vision and reverse engineer the design backwards: see what kind of 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, fast cycle, low-cost experiments to provide evidence
Have a vision to think about, how to do some quick low-cost experiments to test ideas, prove to partners, customers, etc., this is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term achievements as evidence.
Third, develop with forward-thinking 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 root customers in the market you want to enter.
Fourth: Create a comprehensive roadmap for baby steps
includes creating a product roadmap, a customer map, a partner roadmap, and a talent roadmap. Entrepreneurs should have a year- or even three-year roadmap to see how you want the company to progress in these four dimensions.
Example
In the late 1990s, John Osher invented SpinBrush, a low-cost electric toothbrush. Because he saw that there was a big gap in the market: ordinary manual toothbrushes cost two dollars each, and electric toothbrushes cost $50. But between the two, there is no intermediate product.
He wanted to develop a toothbrush, and the price was in between. He thought about the performance standards for the success of the new toothbrush:
is better than manual toothbrushes in cleaning, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price;
has its own battery that can last for three months. If you have to change the battery every week, it will be too frustrating.
has a trial feature in the package. Everyone is willing to see how the toothbrush rotates after starting.
retails for less than $6.
His positioning of the new toothbrush is: it is a better manual toothbrush, not a cheaper electric toothbrush.
For consumers, it went from $2 to $6, not from $50 to $6. Because if it was the latter, the retailer would feel lost: the consumer only spent $6, compared to $50 before. But now, consumers have increased from spending 2 to spending 6.
So entrepreneurs not only have to think about the end user, but also how to make more money for the distributor, because you have to go through them to get the product to the end customer. When defining the competition, a good positioning statement is very important. 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, filling the market gap that no one sees.
Take another example
. The founders of this company called Intuit discovered 20 years ago that many people had to fill out a tax return and submit it to the government every year when dealing with their own tax processing.
Intuit was the first company to develop personal finance software, especially tax management software, which can be used by individuals and small businesses. But this easy-to-use software package, I don't know where to sell it, and no one believes it will work.
Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get your new product to work with distributors. They distribute a lot of things and don't have time to spend five hours checking if your unknown product works.
Finally, he directly assured the consumer: 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 be given to you.
In addition to refunding the money, what else did they do that was different?
With the buyer's permission, follow the buyer to observe his first use process.
All executives of the company must spend two hours a month on technical support for customers and listen to their problems.
Do technical support for Client Server, which is a necessary path for promotion in the company.
Read the customer's letter aloud in front of all executives, whether it is thanks or accusations.
This makes 50% of their sales come from word-of-mouth, and 20% of their sales come from technical support recommendations.
"The intersection of what customers really want and what technology can really do well - that's where true greatness is found."
"Whatever we do, there are customers."
- Scott Cook (founder of Intuit)