How to value fans in the era of social media?

John Quelch said that social media has many marketing challenges, and how to value fans is a big issue. From a marketing perspective, it is important to focus on strong and weak ties. You may think that close friends with strong ties have the greatest marketing impact, but research has found that this is not the case. Instead, those who are more distant from you have the greatest impact.

Speaker | John Quelch

(Professor at Harvard Business School, former Dean of London Business School and Vice Dean of China Europe International Business School)

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

Many entrepreneurs do not have a clear definition of their ultimate vision, so they are busy extinguishing fires and surviving every day.

Entrepreneurial marketing requires good planning

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

To have the right target customers and end users;

To have the right products and services

We need a very talented team to enable business ideas to be realized;

We need good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.

So, what is entrepreneurial marketing?

Firstly, 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 need to start with their vision and reverse engineer their design backwards: see what actions are needed to achieve their vision. Many entrepreneurs do not have a clear definition of their ultimate vision, so they are busy extinguishing fires and surviving every day.

Secondly, fast cycles and low-cost experiments are conducted to provide evidence

Having a vision requires thinking about how to conduct quick and low-cost experiments to test ideas and prove them to partners, customers, and others. This is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term achievements as evidence.

Thirdly, collaborate with visionary clients to develop

Most clients are conservative and do not want to waste time on their new company. You must find visionary clients who are willing to take risks on you. They may be small emerging customers, not good foundation customers for the market you want to enter.

Fourth: Create a comprehensive roadmap that takes small steps and runs quickly

Including creating product roadmap, customer roadmap, partner roadmap, and talent roadmap. Entrepreneurs should have a roadmap that lasts for one or even three years to see how they hope their company can make progress in these four dimensions.

for instance

In the late 1990s, John Osher invented SpinBrush, a low-cost electric toothbrush. Because he realized there was a big gap in the market: a regular manual toothbrush costs two dollars each, while an electric toothbrush costs 50 dollars. But there is no intermediate product between these two.

He wants to develop a toothbrush with a price between the two. He thought about the performance standards for the success of the new toothbrush:

Cleaning should be better than manual toothbrushes, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price;

The built-in battery can last for three months, and it would be too frustrating to replace it every week;

There are trial features in the packaging, and everyone is willing to see how the toothbrush rotates after starting;

The retail price is less than $6.

His positioning for the new toothbrush is that it is a better manual toothbrush, rather than a cheaper electric toothbrush.

For consumers, it increases from $2 to $6, not from $50 to $6. Because if it were the latter, retailers would feel they have lost: consumers only spent $6, compared to $50 before. But now, consumers have increased their spending from 2 yuan to 6 yuan.

So entrepreneurs not only need to consider the end users, but also think about how to make more money for distributors, because you must go through them for products to reach the end customers. A good positioning statement is crucial when defining competition. Finally, he sold the company to Procter&Gamble and earned a total of $480 million.

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

Let me give you another example

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

Intuit was the first company to develop personal finance software, especially for tax management, which can be used by both individuals and small businesses. But this useful software package, I don't know where to sell it to, no one believes it can be used.

Sometimes your biggest problem is how to handle distributors for your new product. They distribute a lot of things and don't have time to spend five hours checking if your unknown product can be used.

Finally, he directly assured the consumer that if they don't learn how to use this product within six minutes of purchase, they will refund the money and receive the product as a gift.

Besides refunding money, what other unique things did they do?

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

All executives of the company must spend two hours a month providing technical support to customers and listening to any problems they encounter;

Providing technical support for customer service is a necessary path for promotion within the company;

Read the customer's letter out loud in front of all executives, whether it's gratitude or criticism.

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

The intersection between what customers truly want and what technology can truly do well is where true greatness can be found

No matter what we do, there are always customers present

——Scott Cook (Founder of Intuit)