John Quilch says that social media has many marketing challenges, and how to value fans is a big problem. From the marketing point of view, we should pay attention to strong ties and weak ties. You may think that strong bonds have the greatest marketing impact. Research has found that it's not like this, but people who are more distant from you.

Speaker John Quilch

(Professor of Harvard Business School, former Dean of London Business School and Vice Dean of CEIBS)

Thank you very much for coming back to listen to my lecture on Sunday morning. For you entrepreneurs, ｏｒ those who want to be entrepreneurs, I have prepared a special lecture today.

Many entrepreneurs do not define their ultimate vision well, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

Start-up marketing, you must plan well

Today we will start with the topic of entrepreneurship marketing, including how you survive and succeed. Start-up marketing includes four key areas, which you must plan well:

Have the right target customers and end users;

Have the right products and services

We should have a very good talent team to make business ideas come true.

We should have good partners, not distributors, but accountants, lawyers and other service partners.

So, what is entrepreneurial marketing?

First, it is reverse engineering design from vision to action.

When Starbucks has only five stores, the founder has a vision to make Starbucks the third space in your life.

Starting with the vision, entrepreneurs need to design reverse engineering backwards: see what actions are needed to achieve the vision. Many entrepreneurs do not define their ultimate vision well, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

Second, fast cycle, low cost trials to provide evidence

With a vision to think about, how to do some fast and low-cost experiments to test creativity, to partners, customers and so on, this is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term results as evidence.

Third, develop with forward-looking customers

Most customers are conservative and don't want to waste time on new companies. You have to find visionary clients who are willing to take risks on you. They may be small, emerging customers, not good base customers in the market you want to enter.

Fourth: Create a comprehensive road map for trotting and fast running

It includes product roadmap, customer roadmap, partner roadmap and talent roadmap. An entrepreneur should have a road map for a year ｏｒ even three years to see how you want the company to make progress in these four dimensions.

For instance

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 dollars. But between the two, there is no intermediate product.

He wants to develop a toothbrush at a price somewhere between the two. He thought about the performance criteria for the success of the new toothbrush:

Cleaner than manual toothbrushes, ｏｒ consumers will not pay higher prices;

The self-contained batteries can last for three months, if the batteries need to be changed every week, they will collapse.

The packaging has the characteristics of trial use. We would like to see how the toothbrush rotates after starting.

The retail price is less than $6.

He positioned the new toothbrush as a better manual toothbrush rather than a cheaper electric toothbrush.

For consumers, it increased from $2 to $6, not from $50 to $6. Because if it's the latter, retailers will feel compensated: consumers only spent $6, compared with $50 before. But now, consumers have gone from two to six.

So entrepreneurs need to think not only about end users, but also about how to make more money for distributors, because you have to go through them to get products to end customers. When defining competition, a good positioning statement is very important. Finally, he sold the company to P&G, making a total of $480 million.

You see, it's very simple, because he has a lot of consumer insights, filling the market gap that nobody sees.

Another example

Intuit, the company's founder, discovered 20 years ago that many people have trouble filling out a tax return every year before handing it over to the government when they are dealing with their own taxes.

Intuit is the first company to develop personal finance software, especially tax management software, which can be used by both individuals and small businesses. But this useful package, no one knows where to sell it, no one believes it works.

Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get the distributor through your new product. They distribute a lot of things and don't have time to spend five hours checking whether your unknown product works ｏｒ not.

Finally, he directly assured the consumer that if he bought the product, he would not learn how to use it in six minutes. The money would be refunded to you and the product would be given to you.

Besides refunding money, what else did they do differently?

With the buyer's permission, follow the buyer to observe his first use.

All executives of the company have to spend two hours a month doing customer technical support and listening to customer problems.

Technical support for customer service is the only way for promotion in the company.

Read the customer's letter aloud in front of all the executives, whether it's thanks ｏｒ criticisms.

This makes 50% of their sales come from word of mouth.