Marketing 101 for startups

If you build the most effective product but nobody hears about it, you’ll make zero sales even though your product works. No one lights a lamp and put it under the bed. Without marketing, your chances of getting sales are negative 100 percent. People cut marketing cost when the reverse should be the case. If you belong to the category saving cash you should have spent on marketing, you are killing your business; even the worlds largest brands and best known companies still run adverts everyday. Coca Cola, Apple, Close up, Nike and the rest.

We'll be breaking down complex startup marketing concepts and sharing insights from the book "Start With Why" written by Simon Sinek

Over next 4 sessions, we’ll cover the basics of startup marketing and sales.

Every instruction, every action, every desire starts with one thing: the decision. When developing solutions, people can employ different approaches; some people build the whole picture then construct backwards while others know where each piece goes in the puzzle so they care less about the arrangement or availability of the pieces at the start. Both might achieve the same result. However it is what we don’t see guarantees the long term success: The one who builds from the end. He understands that everything is by design and not by default. He takes careful steps to put piece by piece according to a plan. This material intends to point you to strategies you can implement to grow your organization. By starting with WHY always when telling your brand story, running an ad, taking an interview or anything that involves your brand, you will be able to inspire loyal customers who will always turn down cheaper alternatives just to stick with you; think Apple fanboys or Blackberry even when in it’s lost state still have lots of loyal users till today. Your business should operate more than the regular rules stipulated, you should learn to run your business like a social movement and not a business.

So to understand why you should start with why, let’s first deal with what happens when you don’t start with why

WHEN YOU DON’T START WITH WHY

Most companies do not start with WHY so when they attempt to gain new customers, they result to manipulations. There are only two ways to inspire human behavior:

1. Manipulate it

2. Inspire it

Manipulations include using fear, peer pressure, aspirational messages, price, promises and more to influence behaviour. It works. Let’s start with price manipulations for a moment and drill down to a strategy a lot of firms use: Breakage.

Breakage: breakage measures the number of customers who fail to take advantage of a discounted product and instead pays the full amount for it. This happens when a customer doesn’t perform the necessary actions required to take advantage of the promo: a process purposely made complicated or inconvenient by the company to increase the likelihood of mistakes or inaction which helps keep the breakage number up. These could include submitting a coupon code sent to your email, cutting out and submitting a code from the carton, manually submitting receipts at the office... Customers can easily send in the wrong part of the box or think submitting physically at an office branch is too stressful and this can delay the application for a rebate for months which could eventually lead to the customer just not bothering to pursue it anymore. For businesses, the short term benefits of rebates are clear: rope customers into buying a product they otherwise would not have bought just because of the prospect of a partial refund. There is mastery to this thing: Samsung in the early 2000s offered cash back up to $150 if you buy their new phone.

But stipulated in their fine print that the rebate was limited to one person per address. Sounds reasonable enough but in practice it disqualified customers who lived in apartment buildings or in compounds where there are tenants since more than one person in the compound would definitely apply for the rebate. Almost everyone who bought the phone were automatically disqualified from accessing the $150 back!

Fear

Fear is the biggest manipulator of all. We use fear to raise our kids, sell products and even drive positive actions. Example: A man held up a white egg and said “this is your brain”. He cracked the egg into a frying pan of sputtering oil. This is your brain on drugs he said. Any questions?

In another ad, a voice said “cocaine doesn’t make you sexy. It makes you dead.”

Politicians tell you their opponents will increase tax or spend less on education. Businesses use fear to inspire actions and get people to but their products. “Every thirty seconds, someone dies of heart attack” was an advert ran by a cardiac specialist. “Do you have snakes in your house? Your neighbour does.” Was the ad on the side of a truck whose company tackles home pollution inspection service.

Insurance companies of course, will sell you life before it’s too late. Aspirational messages: Another example of manipulating human behaviour offers people things they desire to achieve

“You can be rich in six weeks”

“You can lose weight in 3 days”

“Travel to your dream destination” These messages tend towards things you want or the person you want to be. Aspiration can get someone to sign up to a gym buy inspiration is what will keep them going.

Peer pressure

This is very common, Adverts that usually say “half the population uses their products” are using a form of peer pressure to get you roped in. It works because you think the majority of the population is most probably right. Another one which is also pretty common in this Instagram age is celebrity endorsements. Manipulations work for businesses to get customers through the door. But you’ll need a lot more than that; what you want if you are building something for the long term is loyalty. People often mix up repeat business with loyalty. Repeat business is when customers buy from you multiple times. Loyalty is when customers are willing to turn down a better price or better product to continue doing business with you or stick with you even in your down times.

The key take away from today's session is that you often need to start employing bad tactics to find customers when you don't start with why. You start using fear, peer pressure and hope built on the system of breakage to drive up interest in your products. There is a better, saner and more effective way to get customers which doesn't involve the use of these illicit tactics. That's what we'll cover starting tomorrow.

We'll stop here today, remember this Marketing Series is spread over 4 sessions. Ensure to keep up as the next session will take us into a proper dive into the topic.

So now that we have a pretty solid understanding of what happens when we don’t start with why, in our next session. Next, we’ll explore what happens when you start with why and how to actually do it. See you tomorrow!

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