Cult Status by Tim Duggan

Author:Tim Duggan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pantera Press

Know Your Enemy

Every cult business needs an ‘enemy’ to fight to fire up your followers. The enemy might be a problem you’re trying to solve, an industry you want to disrupt, or sometimes even another business.

Fighting something unites all of your community behind a common goal, especially if you’re pushing to make the world a better place. A lot of modern brands have found success in making an enemy out of oil companies, big polluters, plastics and other industries that negatively affect the environment.

When Michael Dubin and Mark Levine founded Dollar Shave Club in 2011, they had their sights on a single enemy: razor companies. At the time Gillette had a 72 per cent market share in the US, with Schick a very distant second.31 Michael and Mark focused everything they had on the competition, using it to fuel their marketing, pricing and community of users who felt like they had never had an alternative to the major razor companies. With prices starting at $1 a month (hence the name of the company), you could get high-quality razors delivered directly to your home. Their tagline ‘stop paying for shave tech you don’t need’ was aimed squarely at their enemy.

Over the next three years, Dollar Shave Club clawed its way to almost 49 per cent of the online razor market, according to Slice Intelligence,32 using their competition to fuel their rapid growth. They expanded to 600 employees globally and four million subscribers. In 2016, Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for US$1 billion.

When Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams launched Canva, a simple online graphic design tool, they had a clear enemy in their sights. For decades, design software had been complicated and burdensome. You needed to take a course just to understand how to use programs like Photoshop, and it was damn expensive too. They focused on creating a free, easy-to-use alternative so that everyone had access to good design. As Canva’s CEO, Melanie has led its growth to a point where over 20 million people in 140 countries now use it every month, and they have a valuation of over US$3 billion.33

Hira Batool Rizvi grew up in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, with a million other residents. When she started working and studying, she met women and girls who were worried about moving around safely. She saw that a lot of women in Pakistan had to navigate an unreliable chain of outdated public transport options, weaving through a predominantly male workforce that would leave them feeling unsafe before they even stepped through their office doorway for the day. Then they would have to repeat that again to get home every day. There were a lot of ‘enemies’ in the inherently sexist system.

Fewer than 30 per cent of Pakistani women are presently in the workforce, and every day 17 million women struggle with getting to and from work.34 Hira says women end up paying four times more than men to travel to work, sometimes up to 40 per cent of their monthly income.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.