Pursuing excellent design
Creating international quality

John Quelch said that social media has many marketing challenges, and how to value fans is a big problem. Thinking from a marketing perspective, focus on strong ties and weak ties. You might think that close friends with strong ties have the greatest marketing impact, but research shows that’s not the case. It’s people who are more distant from you who have the greater impact.

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 very much for coming back to listen to my lecture on Sunday morning. For those of you who are entrepreneurs, or want to be entrepreneurs, I have prepared a special lecture today. Many entrepreneurs have not defined their ultimate vision well, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

For entrepreneurial marketing, you must plan well

Today we will start with the topic of entrepreneurial marketing, including how you survive and succeed. Entrepreneurial marketing includes four key areas that you must plan for well:

• It is necessary to have the right target customers and end users;

• It is necessary to have the right products and services

• It is necessary to have a very good talent team so that business ideas can be realized;

• It is necessary to have good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.

So, what is entrepreneurial marketing? ?

First, this is 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, we need to start with the vision and reverse engineer the design backwards: look at what actions are needed to realize the vision. Many entrepreneurs have not defined their ultimate vision well, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

Second, fast cycle, low-cost experiments to provide evidence

Once you have a vision, think about how to do some fast low-cost experiments to test ideas and prove to partners, customers, etc. that this is a very good vision. In other words, you need evidence of short-term success.

Third, develop together with forward-looking customers

Most customers are conservative and do not want to waste time on new companies. You have to find clients who are forward-thinking and willing to take a risk on you. They may be small emerging customers that are not well established in the market you want to enter.

Fourth: Create a comprehensive roadmap for small steps and fast running

Including 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 that there was a big gap in the market: ordinary manual toothbrushes cost two dollars each, and electric toothbrushes cost $50. But there is no intermediate product between the two.

He wanted to develop a toothbrush with a price somewhere in between. He considered the performance criteria for a successful new toothbrush:

• Cleaning is better than a manual toothbrush, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price;

• The built-in battery can last for three months, and it would be too much trouble to replace the battery every week;

• There is a trial feature in the packaging, and everyone is willing to see how the toothbrush rotates after it is started;

• The retail price is less than $6.

His positioning of the new toothbrush is: a better manual toothbrush, not a cheaper electric toothbrush.

For consumers, it’s an increase from $2 to $6, not a drop from $50 to $6. Because if it's the latter, the retailer will feel like it's a loss: the consumer only spent $6 instead of $50. But now, consumers have increased their spending from 2 yuan to 6 yuan.

So entrepreneurs must not only consider the end users, but also think about how to make distributors make more money, because you must go through them before the products can reach the end customers. When defining competition, a good positioning statement is important. In the end, he sold the company to Procter & Gamble for a total profit of $480 million.

You see, it is actually very simple, because he has a lot of consumer insights and fills the market gap that no one has seen.

Another example

This company is called Intuit. The founder discovered 20 years ago that when dealing with their own tax affairs, many people had to fill out a tax return and submit it to the government every year, which was very troublesome.

Intuit was the first company to develop personal finance software, especially software for tax management, that can be used by both individuals and small businesses. But I don’t know where this useful software package is being sold, and no one believes it can be used.

Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get distributors for your new product. They distribute a lot of stuff and don't have time to spend five hours checking whether your unknown product works.

Finally, he directly assured consumers: If you buy this product and don’t learn how to use it within six minutes, your money will be refunded and the product will be given to you.

Besides 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 senior executives of the company must spend two hours each month providing technical support to customers and listening to problems encountered by customers;

• Providing technical support for customer service is the only way to be promoted in the company;

• Read letters from customers aloud in front of all senior executives, whether it is gratitude or criticism.

This makes 50% of their sales come from word of mouth, and 20% of their sales come from recommendations from technical support.

"The intersection of what customers really want and what technology can really do -- that's where true greatness can be found."

"No matter what we do, there are customers."

——Scott Cook (Founder of Intuit)