In the age of social media, how to value fans?

John Quelch said that social media has many marketing challenges, and how to value fans is a big problem. Thinking from a marketing perspective, we must pay attention to strong and weak ties. You might think that close friends with strong bonds have the greatest marketing impact. Research has found that this is not the case. Instead, the greater impact is people who are more distant from you.

Speaker | John Quelch

(Professor of Harvard Business School, former Dean of London Business School, Associate Dean of China Europe International Business School)

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

Many entrepreneurs do not define the final vision well, so they are busy fighting fire every day and busy surviving.

Entrepreneurship marketing, you must plan

Today will start with the topic of entrepreneurial marketing, including how you survive and succeed. Entrepreneurship marketing includes four key areas, you must plan well:

    Have the right target customers and end users;

    Have the right products and services

    There must be a very good talent team to enable commercial ideas to be realized;

    There must be good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.

So, what is entrepreneurial marketing? ?

First, this is a reverse engineering design from vision to action

When Starbucks only had 5 stores, the founder had a vision to make Starbucks the third space in your life.

Entrepreneurs should start with the vision and reverse engineer the design backward: look at what actions are needed to realize the vision. Many entrepreneurs do not define the final vision well, so they are busy fighting fire every day and busy surviving.

Second, conduct tests in a fast cycle and at low cost to provide evidence

With a vision, we need to think about how to do some quick and low-cost experiments to test ideas, and prove to partners, customers, etc. that this is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term achievements as evidence.

Third, co-develop with forward-looking customers

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

Fourth: Create a comprehensive road map for small steps and fast running

Including the creation of product roadmaps, customer maps, partner roadmaps, and talent roadmaps. Entrepreneurs should have a one-year or even three-year roadmap to see how you want the company to make progress in these four dimensions.

for example

In the late 1990s, John Osher invented SpinBrush, a low-cost electric toothbrush. Because he perceives that there is a big gap in the market: ordinary manual toothbrushes cost $2 each, and electric toothbrushes cost $50. But there is no intermediate product between the two.

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

    It is better than manual toothbrushes for cleaning, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price;

    The built-in battery can be used for three months, and it would be too broken if the battery is changed every week;

    There is a trial feature in the packaging, and everyone is willing to see how the toothbrush rotates after it is started;

    The retail price is less than $6.

His positioning of the new toothbrush is: a better manual toothbrush, not a cheaper electric toothbrush.

For consumers, it increased from US$2 to US$6, not from US$50 to US$6. Because if it is the latter, the retailer will feel lost: the consumer only spent $6, compared to the previous $50. But now, consumers have increased from spending 2 yuan to 6 yuan.

Therefore, entrepreneurs must not only consider the end users, but also think about how to make distributors make more money, because you must pass them before the product can reach the end customers. When defining competition, a good positioning statement is very important. In the end, he sold the company to Procter & Gamble, earning a total of US$480 million.

Everyone, it's actually very simple, because he has a lot of consumer insights, which fills the gap in the market that no one sees.

Give another example

This company is called Intuit. The founder discovered 20 years ago that many people have to fill out a tax declaration form and submit it to the government every year when dealing with their own taxation, which is very troublesome.

Intuit is the first company to develop personal financial management software, especially for tax management software, which can be used by individuals or small businesses. But this easy-to-use software package, I don't know where it is sold, and no one believes it will work.

Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get the distributor for your new product. They distribute a lot of things, and there is no time to spend five hours checking whether your unknown product can be used.

In the end, he directly assured consumers: If you buy this product, if you fail to learn how to use it within six minutes, the money will be refunded to you and the product will be given to you.

In addition to refunding the money, what other things did they do differently?

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

    All senior executives of the company must spend two hours a month to provide technical support for customers and listen to the problems encountered by customers;

    Technical support for customer service is a necessary path for promotion in the company;

    Read the client’s letter aloud in front of all executives, whether it’s thanks or accusations.

This makes 50% of their sales come from word of mouth, and 20% of sales come from recommendations from technical support.

"The intersection of what the customer really wants and the technology can really do well-the real greatness can be found here."

"No matter what we do, there are customers."

——ScottCook (Founder of Intuit)