10 Startup Tips
Chapter 12: Guerrilla Marketing
To do a good job of marketing,
you have to put yourself in the shoes of your customers
if you want to understand their needs.
It’s a lesson you should always carry with you.
Many marketers define their audience by demographic profiles alone.
But to truly understand your customers,
you should know information beyond their gender,
age,
and geographic location.
The more you know,
the easier it is to create a unique brand experience about what
your specific customers want and need.
Definition: “Low budget marketing” should not be confused
with guerrilla marketing.
It would be easy for an impatient entrepreneur to skip this part
and go straight to the sale.
Before doing that, pay attention:
The smarter the marketing, the easier the sale.
Short Definition:
Marketing includes everything involved in making your product
or service meet the needs of your customers.
Marketing consists of 4 elements:
• Product (or service) (Product)
• Place of sale (Place)
• Price (Price)
• Promotion, or method to get customers. (Promotion)
Let’s look at each factor.
This chapter will cover the first element: Product.
Product or service
You may think you know what kind of product
or service you intend to offer your customers,
but consider a few points:
Customers are not interested in your products/services
– they just see what benefits they have.
Sell product benefits, not features:
This may sound obvious,
but why do computers always include hard drive capacity and other specifications?
See, when launching the iMac computer,
the Apple computer company was very genius in making these computers gorgeous
with many striking colors
(the lemon yellow computer quickly sold out).
When you get too close to your product,
you will gradually forget what the product’s real benefit
to the customer is.
Method:
The exercise “What generates the most profit”
below will help you.
Make a list of about five features of your product
or service in the first column.
The second column is the benefit of each of those features to the customer.
These benefits are exactly how you describe your business market.
Once you’ve identified this category of benefits,
the benefits that have
or haven’t formed the basis of your marketing.
Know your business:
This sounds simple, but it’s not:
The Parker Pen Company revolutionized the business
when it realized they were not a pen business but a gift company.
Customers buy their pens as gifts.
And so their closest competitors are not pen companies
but golf clubs,
wallet or wristwatch manufacturers.
This is an extension of the last exercise,
but you need to constantly ask yourself
what your customers are actually buying from you.
Jennifer thinks people come to her cafe
because of the affordable prices.
But maybe they just want a break from the office
during lunchtime.
And in that case,
why don’t you put some newspapers
and put up some comfy chairs?
The success of Starbucks is not due to good coffee,
but rather a “third place”
– not a home or office
– where they can rest.
Also maybe the office workers don’t have enough time?
In this case,
why not offer to bring the food to their office?
And once you get there,
why not introduce them to ready-to-eat food
that they can reheat for dinner?
What do people really want from your gardening service:
want someone to do the heavy lifting,
your bonsai knowledge,
or your creativity?
Depending on the reason,
you can offer a labor-intensive service,
a free design consultation,
or a regular mailing service where bonsai is a seasonal service.
Don’t just see what customers have purchased in the past
or are buying
– think of what they might want to buy
but no one has yet offered.
Make a difference:
You can have an edge over your competitors
by not spending too much money on marketing,
and instead simply being different.
The more unique your product is,
the easier it will be to sell.
Of course, this is only true when your product brings real value to customers.
If your only advantage is low cost,
it will take a long time to succeed.
You can make a difference in many different ways.
It could be from the shipping method:
Peter Wood became a millionaire
and revolutionized the age-old insurance industry.
How is that?
He just used a bright red phone.
But before this type of direct transmission,
no one thought of selling insurance directly
to customers over the phone.
The difference can also be from the added value of the product
that no one has yet provided:
A carpet company has provided hotels
with computer-aided designs.
Before that, hotels often had to close for a few days
to take measurements before installing carpets.
With this new service,
the measurement is calculated on a computer,
so the closing time of the hotel is only half compared to before.
This really brings great benefits to customers.
The difference can also be simple just the appearance of the product:
When Belinda Jarron started a business supplying plants
and flowers for the office,
she decided to name it Fleurtations.
She painted the truck bright pink
and dressed the staff in colorful uniforms.
The advantage is easily distinguishing her company
from other competitors.
An admirable businessman is Gio Benedetti,
an Italian of Scottish descent.
His mind is “different” and he has made quite a lot of money.
His recent business is redesigning mediocre first aid boxes.
The traditional blue first aid box
for decades has not been redesigned.
He launched a new product.
The new box is based on the shape of a Porsche
with the opening designed to resemble the ashtray of his Jaguar.
There’s a thermometer and nifty pieces of tape on the outside.
The box was a little more expensive than the old one but more convenient
and it is now available in all stores across the UK.
Build a great brand with a limited budget
You already have a product/service.
Now you have to brand it.
Most people will think:
“Branding sounds too big and expensive
for a small business like me,
maybe I will skip this part.”
Not to do so.
Now take a moment to think about your biggest recent purchase.
I bet at the time you felt very excited?
I also bet that by now,
you are starting to worry:
Am I buying the right items?
Is its quality good?
Can I get another cheaper one?
Shopping is really scary.
After many years of selling
and listening to customers’ opinions,
I have come to the following somewhat pessimistic conclusion:
Customers don’t want the best
– they want the worst.
I see a lot of people lose contracts when clients say,
“You got the best deal,
but we partnered with a bigger company.”
This got me thinking.
That’s the brand
– it’s a matter of trust.
In a complex and increasingly busy world,
customers want to work only
with what gives them the most sense of security.
The challenge for a small business is how to ensure that
the customer has made a smart decision.
Smoke and mirrors
– how to magnify the brand an American businessman started a document storage business.
He has very few customers.
When potential customers visit,
they see rows of empty bookshelves.
Obviously that does not create trust in customers.
After that, he tried to change the image of the company
by installing a mirror on the wall,
right behind the bookcases
and leaving only a few empty shelves.
Very quickly
– when his potential clients walked in
and saw the vacancies were filled
– they signed him.
I’m not saying you have to lie all the time,
I just mean that sometimes you can make your prospect think
you’re bigger than you really are.
We are working on a large marketing contract with a bank.
They said they wanted to meet us at the office.
We guessed they were worried we weren’t big enough
to handle the work,
so we quickly “hired” some friends to increase the number of employees.
The customer was very happy
and we signed the contract;
then we did well.
Fortunately, they didn’t realize
that people were writing erasers on the desk partition,
documents were reading backwards
or didn’t wonder why we recruited twins.
Remember that while they want the best product,
customers don’t want to be fools
when they bring the product home,
or when they talk about it with other people in the office.
This is the same
as “Nobody gets fired for buying IBM products”.
This is not by chance.
IBM has spent millions of dollars researching the colors for its logo,
“IBM Big Blue,”
which gives customers peace of mind.
Of course, if your product is too creative and too different,
then you make customers want to risk buying your product
and they leave with a product they don’t really want.
This requires exaggerated advertising
– we will discuss this later.
Brand rules
Unity: When asked about the secret to success,
a famous French chef replied:
Excellence is the sum total of small details perfectly done.
To build customer trust,
pay attention to every little detail.
That doesn’t mean you have to spend money.
Make sure your phone always has a uniform greeting,
that your logo is consistent across letters,
envelopes,
uniforms and invoices.
Sandwich chain Pret A Manger even put a chocolate logo on the cappuccino.
Nextdoor.com company specializes in designing
and making doors.
Even if it’s just a small business,
you will immediately be impressed by its professionalism.
In the store,
all employees wear uniforms sewing and drive trucks
– there’s protective clothing with the company logo on,
all bright and clean.
This is an affirmation to the client
that they are working with a professional company.
Your business has a huge brand advantage – it’s you:
Don’t hide behind your company’s name.
Customers want you to be there
when anything happens.
They want to know where you live
and may even call at three in the morning to request a delivery.
Include yourself and your personality in the brand.
Alistair Rutherford started a company called Edinburgh Preserves,
selling homemade chutneys.
After a few years of hard work,
they started receiving orders from big supermarkets.
Alistair decided it was time for the company to become more professional.
So he hired a new label and packaging design company.
When he brought these to his partner supermarkets,
they no longer wanted to order them.
The reason his products are selling well is
because they don’t look like mass-produced products!
Unique: Customers are inundated with advertising.
To solve this problem, your product needs to be unique.
A few years ago we launched an e-commerce magazine.
At that time there were more than 1,000 such business magazines in the UK
and it was calculated that a marketing budget
of £700,000 was needed to do this. We have only 700 pounds.
I decided to introduce the magazine
by spending a week living in a glass display case
with only the Internet.
I debuted with pajamas, a credit card
and a computer in a glass case on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow.
I have a lot of work to do.
I had to order food (40 pounds from the Iceland store
– plenty of food, but no fridge).
I have to throw a dinner party.
I called in a barber,
a 1.83m tall wooden giraffe,
a pipe band and Bentley wine.
Of course, this is not just an exercise in e-commerce,
but also an exercise in crowds.
I was on all the news pages of the major newspapers,
on television,
a radio station entered the display case with me,
in addition to about 1,000 emails a day.
Of the new newspaper launches in Scotland,
we have become the newspaper
with the largest number of readers.
Think like an American:
When you get to know American entrepreneurs firsthand,
you’ll realize they’re not better than others,
but good at making an impression.
Humility has always been a respectable virtue,
but it doesn’t work for the company.
Get confirmation from any clients you’ve worked with.
Try to get big customers
even if all you do for a customer like IBM is sweep their parking lot.
How to name your business
According to all we have said here,
the ideal name for your company is the logo of your product brand.
Don’t worry if you’ve chosen a name that doesn’t evoke anything.
The Tesco Company is named after the wife of its founder, Tessa Cohen.
However, having a suitable name will be to your advantage.
Reaffirmation:
If you’re sure this will be a determining factor for your business’s success,
come up with a name that sounds believable.
A real estate company that wants its name to imply a Scottish business,
connotes wisdom and prosperity
– should choose the name Stuart Wise Ogilvie.
However, don’t be too perfectionistic when it comes to naming
– billionaire Brandon has no problem naming his airline Virgin1.
If the brand name is your name:
Since you are the biggest asset of the business,
it is a well-deserved reward when your name is the company name.
Many consulting firms,
whether in advertising,
law or design,
name their companies after their founders.
Be careful because now you become the symbol of the company.
It’s great if you’re friendly and active,
but it’s also worrisome
if you’re shy and timid.
Think about what would happen
if you sold the business.
Easy to remember:
If these two things aren’t the most important to you,
do something memorable.
If you can make customers smile or impress,
they will remember your name faster.
This makes your marketing simple.
Here are some examples.
An independent TV company called Extra Vegetables:
The company’s founder was invited to attend a BBC shoot
and obviously the producer was very frugal.
That night, in the bar they drank a few more beers
and wrote all of them on the bill as “extra vegetables”.
One event organizer named the program
“Let me hold your balls for you”.
This was one of my first businesses.
I had my own job,
but at the same time received some other unexpected offers.
An IT consulting firm called 3 Frogs
Three frogs sitting on
log,
one decided to jump out,
ask how many are left?
The answer is “three”
– making a decision does not imply action.
The focus of this consulting firm is
to put IT projects into practice.
Beware of acronyms:
I don’t like naming companies after a bunch of acronyms.
Remember the fate of the UK’s Department of Industry
and Trade (DTI) when it changed its name
to the Department of Productivity,
Energy and Industry.
This new name was quickly dropped,
and the old name was reintroduced five days later
when some humorous journalists began
to think of possible abbreviations
for the Department of DIPPY and PENIS. sex).
Name the benefits you will bring to customers:
Don’t name your business based on your personality,
but based on what you do,
or you’ll cause confusion. (Simon)
That’s a pretty good idea by Simon.
Don’t make the brand name something too obvious,
like calling a training company Aspire (meaning “aspiration”),
go for something easier to remember.
Finally, the company Carphone Warehouse
(meaning “car phone warehouse”) doesn’t sell phones,
cars,
and doesn’t have a warehouse,
nor does it cause them any trouble.
