What brands can learn from the startup world
In adapting small tech businesses’ tactics for product development and customer acquisition, big companies can make their products way more successful.
We spent the past couple of years working with big brands. We could fill entire blog posts with conference call war stories, repeating the usual rant about slow decision-making, CC: gangbangs, and expensive things nobody outside of a meeting room would ever find useful.
You won’t get that from us. These rants are even more boring than the worst conference call ever. And more importantly, we had great experiences in working with these companies. We were lucky enough to help build beautiful things, develop successful partnerships, and get some of our favourite creators to craft truly memorable content.
In brief: We learned that quite a lot of brand strategists and marketers are committed to make meaningful things.
What we also learned is that these things often times fall behind their actual potential.
It has been pointed out a lot recently that the Silicon Valley needs to be more concerned with brand building, and that storytelling will be the next core competency in the tech world.
But in the same way, brands should take a cue from the startup world in thinking about product development and customer acquisition as parts of the same process.
Startups need to work on growth every day. They need to test and tweak like crazy, fine-tune their funnel, find ways to increase retention, and ultimately, revenue. In other words: they need to fight to survive. Corporate marketers and their agencies usually don’t. What they need to do is deliver a compelling presentation, build something that all stakeholders will appreciate, and then quickly move on to the next project.
This is a problem. Not having to worry about user numbers and financial challenges on a daily basis reads like a great opportunity on paper but most of the times just leads to mere laziness. Pursuing traction becomes a KPI in a deck, not a daily reality in an office.
It’s the duality of product development and customer acquisition though that makes for true success.
1. Build a meaningful, valuable product.
2. Look for users, from the very start.
Working on building a customer base early on is the best way to validate a product vision in the first place; it’s what will prevent you from building something people don’t really want. And it doesn’t stop with achieving product-market fit. Startups soon need to come up with a scalable process of acquiring and activating customers – and so should brands.
Great products shouldn’t be a fashionable finger exercise in modern marketing. They should have a place in as many real people’s everyday lives as possible.
Product Design is not about having great ideas and bringing those ideas to life. Product Design is about constantly looking for customers.
Here’s what brands should do, just as if they were a startup:
- Extract the story ingrained in your product and make it visible. (If there is no story, you shouldn’t have built the product in the first place.)
- Make sure to tell this story to the right people in the right way. Talk about your topic. Personally reach out to people to build a passionate core community. Only buy media if you would also buy it if the budget came from your own pocket. Test. Tweak.
- Make sure people stay when they come. If they don’t, ask them why. If they do, ask them why. Test. Tweak.
- Make sure your customers have a true reason to share their experience with their communities. Make sure sharing is as easy as possible. Test. Tweak.
- Give people a reason to sign up, so you can collect their data and communicate with them directly if needed. Give them a good reason – no, give them multiple good reasons – to sign up. If they don’t, don’t give up on sign-up. Work on the reason. Test. Tweak.
- Ask yourself if people would pay for what you have on offer. If there’s no way they would ever do that, you should build a different product. Test. Tweak.
- Don’t be lazy. Test. Tweak.
- You will need your budget structure to reflect this way of working. Get whoever signs off your budgets excited about this way of building traction. Don’t show them blog posts like this. Just, err, do it. Create little success stories yourself and show them those. If you control your own budget, truly believe this is the way to go.
