Marketing is telling a story about the value you create for people.
Earlier this year I wrote a post called 25 insights from Seth Godin’s Startup School. My first detailed dive into these insights was Freelancer or Entrepreneur? Seth Godin cares and so should you, here is my second.
Marketing is an interesting idea. Everyone has a different perspective on the definition and practise of marketing. Some people think that advertising and marketing are essentially the same thing, others see that marketing is simply everything that happens with the customer before selling. Here’s my definition:
Marketing is making promises, delivering experiences and telling stories.
Your product should have failed.
Your idea was just another idea. Others have thought of it before and probably dropped it before you started. But you’re here right now because you have a passion to make people feel something they have never felt before. My best guess is that you want to deliver a remarkable experience and tell the world how your product changed the lives of your customers.
You are a storyteller. You are a marketer.
Every entrepreneur must be able to market and sell their work. In the beginning, you can not outsource marketing. Sure, you could outsource advertising, or PR but both of these activities rely on the entrepreneur making promises and telling stories that can be captured and distributed to the world. If you leave the promises up to your outsourced development team and stories to the outsourced PR team, both who have no emotional connection with your product, you indeed will fail.
As the entrepreneur, you decide what identifies the type of customer you want to influence. You decide what you are going to promise and what story you want to resonate with these customers,
Let’s look at some examples.
Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com
Amazon.com
In 2002, Jeff Bezos decided that Amazon.com would reallocate their advertising budget into something that was (at the time) remarkable - free shipping. It turns out that shipping costs were one of the reasons why people didn’t buy goods online. Removing this from the price equation (initially the limit was min $99, then reduced to $25 and now at $35) was one less barrier towards a new customer trusting Amazon and a repeat customer returning. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to not trust Amazon as a worthy retailer, but the early 2000’s was a race to become #1.
In this case, Bezos' focus moved away from interrupting strangers towards delighting new customers and encouraging them to share the remarkability of Amazon. Bezos created a compelling story that people shared: cheaper products and no shipping.
Mailbox reservation queue
Mailbox
The team at Orchestra started working on the Mailbox app in September 2012. They launched in Febuary 2013, served millions of users and sold to Dropbox in March for $100M. What’s the full story? They released a video showing their vision of how Mailbox would change the way people interact with their email. On releasing this video, they hoped to get about 100k views before launching the app but we're lucky enough to have millions of people engaged in their new vision for 'putting email in its place'.
After the launch, they sustained buzz around the product by using a waiting list within the application. A new user would sign up and see their place in the queue, but more importantly, how many people were behind them. This is remarkability at it's core. Everyone was talking about Mailbox in their social circles by comparing their place in the activation queue.
The Tile
Tile
Back in July I interviewed Mike and Nick from Tile. At that point they were in the middle of their self starter crowdfunding campaign. They were only a couple of hundred thousand dollars in, and already 20x more successful than they expected. By the end of the campaign, they raised $2.6M in crowdfunding presages for their new product. During the interview, I asked the guys what they thought the critical keys to their success were. Apart from answering every question on every blog where people were commenting about the press coverage of Tile, the guys were very focused on what they stood for and what change they were making in the world.
No Android support, no replaceable batteries, one color.
Mike and Nick were not trying to please everyone who had an opinion. They knew that their product would change the lives of their customers and nothing else matters for now. The fact that an Android user slags them off because they don't support his phone, simply didn't both them.
What did you learn about marketing and telling stories from Seth Godin’s Startup School?