Here is a quote from Jeff Bezos on the Charlie Rose Show:
Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.
The individual is empowered is the ultimate shift in marketing and business today.
Unlike any other media (TV, radio, magazine, newspaper) before, Internet and social network spaces are far more equipped to filter out all the noises and leave only relevant content for its audience.
It doesn’t necessary mean that there is less noise online.
Not at all. In fact, the opposite is true. There are way more useless and untrustworthy sources online. However, it’s getting more and more difficult for it to find its way into our Facebook feed.
We decide what to watch, not the TV stations. We decide what to listen to, not the radio stations. We decide what to read, not the newspaper publishers.
More importantly, we also decide what to talk about.
Even more importantly, our Facebook friends and Google choose to listen to us.
Having 1,000 of your followers broadcasting your products to 1,000 of their friends is far more effective than running a commercial during Super Bowl. And a lot cheaper, too. Cheaper in a sense that the cost of reaching the audience is reduce to almost zero.
But you pay a price for that.
Your time and resources and money need to be invested into making a great product. Take it away from the shouting you used to do, and invest it now. Because without a great product — something that’s worth mentioning about in my Facebook or Twitter feed — you get nothing.
#1) Connect to your customers.
The obvious thing to do. Almost everyone does it.
#2) Connect your customers to each other.
Sometimes though, you forget that in order to build your tribe — a group of people who shares a common goal/interest — you need your tribe members to talk to one another. Broadcasting is nice, but interactions and conversations are far more powerful.
#3) Give them something to talk about.
Be it your product, service or simply something that’s of their interest. Don’t be afraid to bring a little controversy in order to ignite the conversations.
#4) Lead them in a direction that benefits them more than it benefits you.
Show them where you are going, and make sure the destination is align with theirs.
Yes, we all know you are trying to sell something, but the more important question is: with whatever you are building, can you convince your tribe that it’s to their benefit to have you in their lives?
Traditional companies still think along the lines of “lower the price, sell more, and make more money.” They try hard, very hard, to turn each invention or discovery into commodity, something that could be easily recreated and assembled by not-so-skilled workers whose only job is to follow some standard operation procedures.
But the real bottom line is how much money you make.
Apple is living-proof that market-share no longer matters, mind-share does. When everyone is thinking and talking about you, you will be able to sell something that others are giving away for free, for a huge profit.
Before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, cell phone manufacturers and service providers were busy figuring out how to lower the handset price so that they can entice their customers into multi-year contracts and make money on service plans.
When iPhone was first launched, even Bill Gates said something like, “let’s be honest, it’s still only a cellphone selling at $500.” Yes, it was, and it totally worked. Today, with just 3% of the smartphone market-share, iPhone has completely swallowed the lion’s share of its profits.
Has it ever occur to you that Google could be wrong? More specifically, the top 5 search results returned all contain false information? Or that an article on Wikipedia is not 100% accurate? It’s improbable, but certainly possible, right?
Would you continue to use Google and Wikipedia to find answers if that happens? Of course you would.
When a brand has done enough right, 100, 1,000, 10,000, whatever that number may be, it will eventually reach a point where its customers (or fans) become forgiving of their wrongs. The problem, though, is that before that number is reached and trust is established, any wrong could very well cost you that customer, forever.
We are all bound to make mistakes, that’s a given. Our goal shouldn’t be to avoid mistakes and take less risks. Instead, it should be a race to that magic number so that our customers will forgive us of our mistakes.
When Tony Hsieh speaks about entrepreneurship and happiness, you should probably listen, especially when Guy Kawasaki is the one who is doing the interview.
Q: What is the math behind the policy of two-way free and overnight shipping?
A: Our philosophy is to take most of the money we would have spent on paid marketing or paid advertising and instead invest it into the customer experience, and let our customers do the marketing for us through word of mouth. We view the free shipping both ways and surprise upgrades to overnight shipping as our marketing costs.
Reminds me of the following quote from Andy Sernovitz and cartoon from Hugh MacLeod.
The commercial below has gotten a lot of attention lately. It created many conversations online and was even among the prime-time Emmy Award nominees in the outstanding commercial category.
And that’s one of the ultimate goals of any advertisement — to create a spokesperson to could be easily remembered and identified with the company. Remember the Verizon “can you hear me now” guy?
Old Spice has taken this one step further though.
Apparently, the OSD is now answering questions on Twitter with personalized YouTubevideosclips. With each clip getting anywhere between 500,000 to 2,000,000 views, is there any better way to follow up a hit commercial?
Microsoft’s head of U.S. sales Keith Lorizio blames Facebook and other social network sites for low online ad prices. You can’t really fault him for that, of course. Facebook and MySpace gets about $0.56 CPM on average, while the Internet at large gets an average of $2.43.
The problem, though, is that most of these social network sites are still struggling to come up with an effective and efficient way of turning a profit.
Let’s just imagine for a moment that one of those sites has all of the sudden decided that selling advertisement isn’t way to go. Instead, they have figured out another method of generating income from all the attention and time on site that they receive. Furthermore, they have decided to give away all these ads for free.
My blog has been hacked twice in recent weeks. So a little research on Google gives me the following video, which is helpful in making your WordPress more secure.
Many businesses bet on their customers being stupid.
Their customers aren’t really stupid, of course. They are merely uninformed and uneducated. How much does an average consumer really know about shampoos, cars, cameras, soft drinks, etc.?
Businesses spent money to promote clever tag lines, easy-to-remember jingles, and/or catchy product names so that consumers will remember them at the time of their purchase.
None of the other stuff mattered, because it was hard to get a hold of them (at the time of the purchase) that consumers simply didn’t bother trying.
Everything has changed now.
There is more than enough well organized, easily accessible, and FREE information available online today, that any consumer, if they wanted, could make a smart decision on just about any product.
So perhaps now is the time to change your approach.
Instead of betting on your customers to be misinformed or uninformed, you offer to educate them — not just about your company or your products, but also your industry. Make a great product, then empower them with enough knowledge to separate greatness from mediocrity.
…and bet on them being smart enough to pick you over anyone else.
When I talk to website/business owners and ask them what they plan to do to win over customers, one of the most common answers is “we provide great service”.
And when I continue to ask about what they mean by great service, they would give me a list of things such as:
fast shipping, we ship within 1 day of receiving the order.
free shipping, ground shipping only of course.
30-day, 100% refund policy, except on used/opened products, then there will be a 15% restocking charge.
good communication, we respond quickly to every customer email.
we listen to what our customers have to say, and try to fulfill their needs to the best of our capability.
The list goes on.
It is usually at this point I stop the client and ask, “is there anything on the list that your customers do NOT expect you to do?”
You see, I define great service as providing something out of the ordinary, unexpected by your customers, and is so far above the industry standards that they can’t help but to talk about it.
Everyone can make the bold claim of “customers should buy from us because even though we don’t have the lowest prices, we always give our best effort on service”.
But when your “best effort on service” is merely average — average, by definition, is basically doing what everyone else does — then you really shouldn’t have any complaints about not having enough customers, should you?
Or at the very least, switch from website-thinking to App-thinking. Why? Because App-like websites win, simple as that. Think about the top websites in the world, the ones that you and everyone around you uses everyday, they are all App-like, aren’t they?
Google is an App, so is Youtube, Yelp, Facebook.
Apps are simple, straightforward, and usually serve only one purpose.
Apps solve problems. They start by answering two simple but crucial question: 1) what do our users need and 2) how do we fill that need?
Apps can be sold, but usually they are free — the things that are worth giving away have to be good enough so that people are willing to pay for them.
And perhaps the single most important reason that you should consider building an App for your business is the lack of competition. There are literally billions of websites competing for attention. As of today, the biggest App store online (Apple) only has about 200,000. It’s really just simple math, isn’t it?
Our whole life, we have been told implicitly and explicitly by various people, people we love and people who love us, about what we could or couldn’t accomplish.
And we have always chosen to believe them, ALL THE TIME.
I recently tried this pizza place in San Jose called A Slice of New York. It’s a nice little “hole in the wall” pizza joint that has been getting raving reviews on Yelp.
Here is what happened during my order.
Me: Can I have a slice of the Hawaiian pizza?
Server: One second.
[He took out the slice, looked at it for a second, then took out a second slice, and shook his head]
Server: I am sorry, but I think the Hawaiian pizza is a little bit too crispy, and I am not comfortable serving it. Do you want to switch to something else?
So I ended up getting another (more expensive) slice for the same price.
I wonder how many of us would voluntarily tell customers that our product is just not good enough.
Especially when the customer is just about ready to buy. That took a lot of guts and integrity to do, didn’t it? I mean, I wasn’t aware of how good or bad the pizza might have tasted. Heck, it would probably have tasted better than anything I have had before anyway.
And that’s what impressed me most.
Think about that for a second. How many times have you heard or used the argument, “but what we have is already better than that company”, and gave into mediocrity?
“I am not comfortable serving it.” That’s what separates good from great.
Today, Seth Godin did a post about stamps.com, and the first three words were:
Avoid Stamps.com
Considering the fact that Seth has literally hundreds of thousands followers who reads his blog daily, if I am running a business, he is the one person I definitely don’t want to piss off — if I am not doing a good enough job to impress him, I would make sure that I do a good enough job not to upset him.
But wait, it’s not just Seth. Remember this story? When someone with just 20 Twitter followers caused an absolutely horrifying PR nightmare for Horizon.
With the way Social Media has connected the world today, you are left with no choice but to piss off NO ONE.
Who knows how much impact a single negative review on Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube might have on your business?
The Internet amplifies everything, and bad news almost always travels faster than good news.
Producer finds a story, and decides that it can be made into a movie.
Screenwriter writes a screenplay.
Producer and screenwriter prepares a film pitch, and finds financial support.
The film is designed and planned. Budgets are set, cast and crew are hired, locations are selected, and sets are built.
The film is created and shot.
The film is edited and completed. Final touches are added.
The film is screened for potential buyers (distributors), is picked up by a distributor and reaches its cinema and/or home media audience.
There isn’t much difference between a great movie and a bad movie as far as the whole manufacturing process goes.
The difference is that, in a bad movie, everyone along the way is so concerned about getting the job done and getting paid, that not one single person, from top to bottom, had the courage to speak up and demand greatness.
Let’s just hope that the same thing doesn’t happen in whichever place you work at.
