The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank

Author:Steve Blank [Blank, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Entrepreneurship, General, Leadership, Personal Finance
ISBN: 9781119690375
Google: 6yrfDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2020-03-17T00:04:27.839524+00:00

The Customer Creation Philosophy

As part of the marketing advisory board at PhotosToYou, I listened to the company's launch, rollout, and branding strategies emerge. It seemed to me the company was making several mistakes.

First, in being so exclusively focused on branding tactics and launch, the company ignored the fundamental discussion of which kind of market PhotosToYou was in. No one had stopped to consider whether the company was entering an existing market, resegmenting an existing market or creating a new market. (Remember our Market Type definitions from Chapter 2; you're in a new market when you enable customers to do something they couldn't do before.)

The only people who could be PhotosToYou customers were digital camera customers. Therefore, the company's revenue was bounded by the size and growth of the new digital camera market. I argued even if they acquired 100% of all the digital camera customers with high-speed Internet access it wouldn't matter, because there were so few of them (remember this was in 1999). Since we were creating a new market, I suggested that the PhotosToYou business would take three to five years to develop. For the next two years, their market growth would be limited by outside factors (digital camera and broadband Internet adoption rate) and this was going to be a long-term war, not a short-term grab for nonexistent market share. The relevance of this argument to their marketing and branding strategy was that in a new market, spending money early to grab market share was a very bad idea. A consumer choice in this area wasn't permanent (as early customers were likely to experiment with multiple photo printing sites), and next year, when there would be eight times as many available customers, PhotosToYou wouldn't have the marketing dollars to reach them. I suggested that, rather than start expensive demand-creation activities now, PhotosToYou preserve its huge pile of cash and hunker down for the long term. Instead of a huge formal onslaught launch, they should implement an early adopter launch.

I also offered that in a new market the first year's marketing communication goals should be focused on fostering market adoption, not market share, and the company's demand-creation activities should be low-cost attempts to educate customers about the new online photofinishing market, not hugely expensive customer acquisition programs for the few customers who existed at that time. My belief was in a new market, only the early adopters—the earlyvangelists—will find the product and spread the word.

The PhotosToYou executives didn't get it. “Why are you telling us about this different Market Type stuff? It has nothing to do with how we launch and promote our products. We've always done it this way in big companies and startups.”

Trust me, this is not the advice you want to give to young, high-testosterone marketers—particularly ones being encouraged by even higher testosterone board members whose mantra was “get big fast.” The board and the marketing executives thought I just didn't get it. So, my recommendations notwithstanding, the PhotosToYou marketing spending machine started like it was in an existing market and, like a steamroller going downhill, there was no stopping it.

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.