Category: Marketing Insight

Rant – US financial crisis

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s the startup blog view on the $700b bailout plan.

In a free market private profits should also result in provite losses – not public sharing.

If the crisis didn’t happen the US taxpayers would not have shared in the upside – so why should they bail them out? The fact is – the hard economic lessons need to be learned. The USA economy needs the pain of a recession to re-calibrate the market mechanics and the ‘philosophy’ of the market participants. Unless reality hits – more events of this nature will occur.

UGC & Crowd Sourcing – Beware the Homer mobile

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

There is plenty of buzz around UGC (User Generated Content), Crowd Sourcing and Mass Customization at the moment. And the truth is I am a sucker for it. I embrace it, love it and really believe it is an economic revolution. In fact many of the new features we’ve implemented on rentoid have been at the suggestions of our members…. but there is a downside.

We need to be aware that not every consumer knows what they are talking about, and not every idea we get from the crowd happens to be a good one. The crowd can get it wrong occasionally. Yep – there are people out there with ideas that just might send you broke if implemented.

If we are building a forum for people to create & share their own stuff on like Youtube or Etsy – that’s when it’s a cool idea to let the crowd take over. That’s when it’s cool to build the forum and get the hell out of the way. But when it comes to them designing and creating products for others – we need to keep our heads. In fact if there is one piece of advice startup blog can give is know which business you are in:

A) Are you building a forum for them to connect on?

or

B) Are you building a product for them – with their input?

If you are doing the latter – that’s when you need to be wary of the Homer mobile.

Instead, what we need to do when we want the crowds input is look to our “lead user group”. The lead user group is our base of fans who are knowledgeable, expert, style leaders or simply influential. These are the people we need to listen to when UGC is part of the mix, but not the whole story.

Trick Pricing

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

We are smart people.

We don’t get duped very often.

We know a scam when you see when.

We’re even smart enough to know that $9.95 is really $10.00

So why would we treat our customers in such a condescending manner. Do we really think that any of our customers won’t be smart enough to know this?

Now that we have answered this question let’s ask ourselves why you would ever engage in such trick pricing for our customers.

At last, we’re entering the age of ‘authentic capitalism’, and $0.99 cents isn’t fooling anyone. In fact, you’re quite possibly embarrassing yourself on a commercial level and damaging your brand or start up. The threshold price point is the biggest hoax in consumer marketing. My suggestion, is to have honest pricing.  Charge to the dollar. Make it simple and gain respect simultaneously. Our customers won’t mind, really.

Who wants a pocket full of change anyway?

Trophy Ideas

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Trophy Ideas shouldn’t be your first attempt at a start up.

Definition: Highly original and ‘expensive’ business concept which could change the behaviour of consumers, business or the world and make you rich in the process.

Trophy ideas are typically capital intensive and have long lead times to get up. They usually involve external capital. They’re often the domain of inventors. The reason that trophy ideas are onerous is that they don’t succeed very often and they take up the two most valuable tools we have, time and money, and lots of it. Sometimes people dedicate large portions of their life to trophy ideas. But we only ever here about the successful ones. An example might be the Dyson vacuum.

Here’s some startup blog advice if you want to go for a trophy idea. Do it after you’ve had some smaller successes first. Do it when you already have passive cash flow from another startup, business or investments. We should all pursue things that are worth doing, the trick is knowing the right time to chase them.

Territory

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I just saw a stray cat enter our backyard much to the distain of our moggy. You know what happened…

There was a lot of hissing, a couple of left jabs with claws out, bushy tails and the obligatory chase up over the back fence.

Territory is about physical space, location, proximity to food, water and shelter. The basics which sustain life. Our cat was simply protecting what it needs to survive. Humans do it too. And so should your business or startup.

Cats are pretty smart. They know that there isn’t really enough room for two in most houses. It’s no different with brands. Great brands are always territorial. When the local alley cat turns up for a feed, the incumbent brand wont move to the left and share the food bowl. There’ll be fight, every time.

But the trick is this, brands are only territorial about their house (read here key distribution point). If you’re getting a great feed elsewhere, they won’t even notice. You can build some momentum and cashflow before they notice you’re gaining size and power. If you want to get off the street like your local alley cat, stop living day to day, then you and your startup have to find a new place without a cat. Be nice to the owners (your customers / audience), offer them something emotional and they might just adopt you.

Empirical evidence

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

By the time an insight is empirical, measured and proven, it is no longer an insight.

Here’s how startup blog defines the term Insight as it pertains to marketing:

A revelation of consumer understanding, which is not currently being leveraged for profit.

It needs to be a revelation to be an insight. If we are leveraging… “The insight of…” – that is the insight everyone agrees on and knows about, we’ll just be swimming in competitive soup.

AFL Legend – John Kennedy ‘Do something’

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

This advice matters to everyone: Favour action over all things.

For the uninitiated: This speach was given by a famous football coach in Australia during an AFL Grand Final (think Superbowl / FA Cup). With passion he emplored his campaigners to just get out there and do whatever they could. The end result being a victory – or the ability to say ‘at least I had a go…’

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9db1GgNtCKw]