Ready, Launch, Brand

The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups

Orly Zeewy

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000351996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

"A powerful and urgent introduction to lean marketing and the magic of getting it right."

-- Seth Godin, author, This is Marketing

You may be familiar with the Silicon Valley expression about the iterative approach to software development, "We're learning to fly the plane while we're building it." If so, think of a startup—with all its moving parts, phases, and personalities—as flying a plane, while you're building it, booking passengers, marketing the airline, interviewing co-pilots, and serving coffee. In this book, Orly Zeewy navigates the turbulence and provides a flight plan so you know when you've landed in the right airport.

Orly Zeewy is a brand architect who helps startups cut through the noise. She has worked with dozens of founders and entrepreneurs to uncover their brands' DNA. In Ready, Launch, Brand: The Lean Marketing Guide for Startups you will learn how to close the marketing gaps that can slow down sales and make it harder to scale your business. Orly shares her brand process for building the right team, attracting brand evangelists, and cultivating a sustainable company culture.

Prior to starting her brand consulting practice, Orly ran the award-winning Zeewy Design and Marketing Communications firm and directed marketing programs for national clients such as CIGNA, Kraft Foods, and Prince Tennis. She has lectured at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, taught at the Charles D. Close School of Entrepreneurship at Drexel University, and been featured in the business section of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

1

If You Ask the Wrong Question, the Answer Doesn’t Matter

Marketing Myth #1: Marketing is just smoke and mirrors.

Marketing and branding are some of the most important early-stage indicators of a company’s potential success.

—Mamoon Hamid, venture capitalist and partner, Kleiner Perkins

Who Are You?

Are you an elephant or an alligator? Because, let’s face it: if you’re an alligator, then why are you planting shrubs and grassland instead of creating wetlands? All too often, founders expect marketing to be a magic pill that fixes vague messaging and the lack of a clear value proposition. Yet, they never even ask themselves the essential questions. How are we different from our competition? Are we clear on our ideal target customer, and, more important, do we know what matters to them? If we don’t know, what do we need to do to find out? If you can’t answer these questions, no amount of marketing will help you increase sales. This is the “closed loop” of marketing. If you expect marketing to fail, you won’t look for answers; you’ll keep doing the same thing, guaranteeing that marketing will fail.

With traditional marketing, the goal is growing an existing business, but Lean Marketing helps startups get clear on who they think they are as a brand and who they are trying to connect with (ideal customers). Lean Marketing takes the guesswork out of marketing in that critical first year so your startup can build brand awareness more quickly with the right customer. And just like traditional marketing, it’s a process with clear metrics so founders know when their goals have been met.

Founder Story: Anthony Gold, ROAR for Good

ROAR for Good is a mission-driven technology company dedicated to cultivating safer workplaces. Their platform, AlwaysOn, was designed to protect hotel employees.

When I founded my first startup in 2012, we thought of marketing as a transitional moment, so we did it all wrong. When we started ROAR for Good in 2015, a smart, safety wearable device for women, we wanted to make sure we were building something that the market would buy. We didn’t want confirming data; we didn’t want to know whether or not people liked it. We sat in coffee shops with pictures of our prototype and asked people why it wouldn’t work. We spoke with dozens of people over a period of a couple of months and sent out surveys using Facebook and Google forms, targeting women, and conducted a random drawing for a gift card to incentivize people to talk to us. We collected hundreds of data points, from self-defense group instructors and women who wanted to learn about self-defense. What we learned shattered our initial hypothesis that women want a self-defense tool, but the problem is that it’s hard to get to. At the time, we considered a mace bracelet that would shoot out pepper spray and spent time on engineering it. What we found out is that mace is illegal in several states, and women are frightened by self-defense tools and the idea of being overpowered. Our research led to a brand-new framework. We went back to our mission, which is to end rape and reduce the murder rate for women.

We thought we had a brilliant idea and that women would love it. They hated it. The sooner you’re able to show it’s a bad idea, the less time you spend investing in something that will fail.

— Anthony Gold, co-founder and COO, ROAR for Good

Advice to Founders

Many entrepreneurs have a great idea. As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve found that, typically, you are either solving a major pain point or addressing an opportunity. It’s all in the execution. I’ve seen mediocre ideas succeed because of how well they were executed. You also have to be open to pivot on a dime when your research shows you are wrong. Some of the best products have come out of failure. Look for a market opportunity and be prepared to be surprised.

The Odds of Startup Success

More than 500,000 companies are launched every month in the United States alone. Eight out of ten will fail in the first five years. Three key factors account for this sobering trend. Number one is that there is no market need for what they offer. The other two reasons? Startups run out of cash, and they don’t have the right team.

If you want your startup to beat those tough odds, you’ll need to invest enough time to research your market, identify and verify your revenue model, and develop a viable strategy for how you’ll reach your customers. Remember that consumer products are the most expensive and time-consuming to launch because your marketing will have to cover a lot of media channels to get a consumer’s attention. What startups fail to consider is that new products are just that—new. You’ll have to earn consumers’ trust while you educate them on why your product is better than what they already use. Social media is a great way to shorten that cycle. If you can tap into key influencers with 100,000+ followers who love your product, they can help get your name out and build your brand awareness more quickly than you can on your own. But social media can be a double-edged sword. One wrong move, and 100,000+ consumers won’t be shy about telling everyone in their network.

As a startup, building the right team is critical to scaling your business. But too often, founders come together on the basis of a vague concept of a future success rather than on shared values. It’s much easier to build the right team when you can quickly recognize when someone is a fit with your brand’s values and when they’re not. This is why clarifying your brand’s value proposition is so important from the start. Do you know what makes your brand different? Do you have a core value that will grow with you? Are you willing to build an entire company on that core value?

Figure 1.1
Top 20 Reasons that Startups Fail

Nordstrom empowers its employees to accept any return, even when it’s merchandise they don’t sell. Nordstrom lore offers many examples, such as the time in the mid-1970s when the department store chain purchased a tire store in Fairbanks, Alaska, and turned it into a men’s store. One day, a confused shopper brought a set of tires into the store asking for a refund, and without missing a beat, the salesperson took them back without a receipt, no questions asked—even though Nordstrom has never sold tires. That’s what customer service looks like when it’s at the heart of your business.

Do You Have An Ugly Baby?

Once you’ve completed your market research, take the time to understand who your ideal customer is, what that customer wants, and, most important, if they are willing to pay for your product or service. You’ll need to talk to a lot of people to make sure you’ve targeted the right customers and your product addresses a true pain point or problem. You may find that people have come up with a workaround that renders your product obsolete, but with additional data, you might just create a more viable, affordable, and attractive product that leaves their workaround in the dust. Or, you could learn of a more pressing problem that your customer is struggling with, one that your product could easily address.

Finally, before you invest in launching a new product or service, ask yourself: Are there enough people with the same problem to make my business viable? Your family and ten of your closest friends is not a market share. That’s why it’s so important to talk to people you don’t know and who have no vested interest in your success. You’ll gain much better insights, and you’ll avoid confirmation bias.

Instead of launching a market-ready product or service and looking for a problem to solve, take a page from The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank. Identify who you believe will be your potential customer—your early adopters. Create a minimum ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Are You Ready to Take Over the World?
• Chapter 1: If You Ask the Wrong Question, the Answer Doesn’t Matter
• Chapter 2: The Nike Syndrome
• Chapter 3: The Gold Standard: Word-of-Mouth
• Chapter 4: A Rose by Any Other Name …
• Chapter 5: Is Your Homepage Helping Your Brand Cut Through the Noise?
• Chapter 6: The New Age of Commerce
• Chapter 7: Is Your Story Button On?
• Chapter 8: The Future Is Entrepreneurial
• Chapter 9: Conclusion: Show Me the Money
• Index