B2B Product Marketing Insights: Aug 2021
📈 8 MINI GROWTH CASE STUDIES
[1] Highlight local roots to improve your product’s desirability and customer’s willingness to pay
Consumers increasingly seek products with a local identity. No surprise big brewers still play to the local history of the microbreweries they acquire even after they move production out of town.
[2] Keep product discovery and final purchase within the same platform to improve sales win rates
Twitter is testing out a ‘shop module’ which would allow users to buy products from any business inside the app. Instagram also introduced a similar feature last year.
[3] Make privacy the mainstay to carve out profitable niches in well-established business models
The renewed popularity of camping has given rise to privacy concerns in public campgrounds. ‘Explore Eden’ allows people to book campsites on private property – be it RV-ready spots or “glamping” for an additional charge.
[4] Reproduce a popular customer experience in a whole new setting to attract new clientele
Starbucks brought the famous Italian coffee bar experience to Seattle. Chipotle recreated the San Francisco burrito restaurant experience in Denver.
[5] Find partnerships to create new revenue streams from underutilized assets
WeWork signed a lot of leases in the quest to grow quickly. The company will now act as an operator of coworking spaces and will no longer be a renter in its latest growth plan. WeWork, for example, will operate coworking spaces in Saks Fifth Avenue locations in return for a cut of their sales.
[6] Eliminate the highest pain point in your customer’s journey by bringing product delivery closer
Spotify noticed the challenges in the changing music consumption behavior – the need to access music libraries cheaply and instantly (ex: Napster, Kazaa) while also avoiding piracy concerns. Spotify’s launch in 2008 leveraged “web-based interactivity and sharing” by letting customers access music whenever and wherever.
[7] Create spaces to interact directly with your most loyal customers to track ‘emergent culture’
Discord allows brands like Chipotle, Hot Topic to interact directly with their most loyal customers by creating their own branded communities. Community engagement for brands in Discord can take the form of virtual job fairs, real-time interactions, product auctions.
[8] Resort to marketing, partnerships, other inorganic activities only after you see an organic trend
Waze tried chasing a specific city or country many times in their early days without much luck. Once it saw certain markets grow organically (ex: France), it started investing in those markets as opposed to markets with low organic traction (ex: Germany).
📚 2 BOOKS & THEIR TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] “Built to Fail: The Inside Story of Blockbuster’s Inevitable Bust” by Alan Payne
Blockbuster had a wealth of information on every customer – ex: gender, age, address, every movie they rented, etc. – but never put that to use.
Being unable to manage rental inventory was an issue that plagued Blockbuster since its high growth days. Even a 5% improvement in buying accuracy would’ve saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even before streaming, Netflix beat Blockbuster by renting older movies 80% of the time vs. Blockbuster’s 10%. The latter was in a financial death spiral trying to secure new releases from studios.
[2] “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success” by Ron Friedman
Pattern recognition engines have 4 major components: (1) data collection, (2) unpack the data samples and find important variations, (3) detect similarities in those variations, (4) generate predictions.
Two ideal forms of practice: (1) analyze past experience to identify important lessons, (2) simulate performance in advance.
Three categories of questions work well when interviewing experts: (1) journey questions: understanding an expert’s path from amateur to professional, (2) process questions: drilling down on specific steps they apply to bring their work to life, (3) discovery questions: unexpected revelations in their journey.
🧠 10 CURATED BUSINESS THINK PIECES
[1] Why product and services marketplaces earn profits differently at scale
[2] How online creators are parlaying their success into “microfunds”
[3] Massive infrastructure spending has a dark side
[4] Three Big Things: The most important forces shaping the world
[5] Curators all the way down – the relationship between curation and commerce
[6] The Hype Subsidy – why early hype is dangerous in consumer social
[7] Turning networks into economies
[8] Are “Buy Now, Pay Later” retail loans a rip-off?
[9] The NFT Ecosystem explained
[10] The metaverse has always been a dystopian idea
Keep Learning and Carry On!
Sign up for my free MONTHLY NEWSLETTER to get the best B2B product marketing content from around the web – 8 mini case studies / 2 books & their top 3 insights / 10 curated business think pieces