Marketing Mystic

TiEcon 2008 panel on 'Taking on the incumbents'

Moderator(s):

Guy Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures

Panelist(s):

Chris Larsen, Prosper Marketplace, Inc.

Peter Luethi, Jet Airways India Ltd.

Sanjiv Malhotra, Oorja Protonics

Marten Mickos, Sun Microsystems Inc.

                               

This is the first time that I’ve ever heard or seen Guy Kawasaki in person. He sure is funny and sharp as heck. Overall, the panel wasn’t all that interesting but Guy was extremely entertaining with his quips on how ‘German service is an oxymoron’ and in this web 2.0 world , ‘nothing’s a secret but there’s no verification either’. Most hilarious was when he kept trying to get Peter Luethi (Jet Airways) to confess which airline he would use if he were flying to London. I think the discussion would have been all more interesting, if he was on the panel rather than moderating it. Here are my key takeaways from this discussion:

Operate under the radar.

Incumbents usually have the attitude that the newcomers are not worth bothering about. This works in favor of the newcomers, who can fly under the radar and grow quickly until they get to a point when the competitors start noticing them but they are big enough either to thwart them or get acquired. Marten Mickos (formerly of MySQL) was very entertaining and offered some great insights. MySQL approached Oracle and Microsoft both to find an ally in its effort to take on IBM. (MySQL was acquired by Sun Microsystems).

If you can’t kill them, partner with them.

If your market has multiple incumbents. Consider partnering with one competitor and offer something that they are not able to offer. In other words, complement an incumbent’s existing offerings rather than taking on the incumbent head on.

Your enemy’s enemy is your best friend.

Don’t try to go it alone. If you have multiple incumbents, partner with one competitor to take on the other. Understand your market’s competitive dynamics and leverage that to create synergies that help your growth.

Rally support from your customer.

Find the underserved need in your target market and fill that gap. Go to the customer directly and create demand for your product by focusing on that. Jet Airways is trying to fill the need that no other airline currently, which is to bring back the ‘luxury’ in aviation by offering amenities and facilities that make air travel more enjoyable.

TiEcon 2008 panel on 'Creating Buzz'

Scaling: Building Buzz and Winning Customers

   

Moderator:

  Matt Marshall, VentureBeat

Panelists:

  James Joaquin, Bridgescale Partners

  Krishna 'Kittu' Kolluri, New Enterprise Associates
  Dave McClure, Stanford University
  Indu Navar, Serus Corporation

 

This was a great discussion on how to create buzz and acquire customers. Here's a brief list of key takeaways from this panel:

- Influence the influencers. Invite bloggers, analysts, reporters, and your other key influencers into your world, share information on your business/product so they can evangelize your business for you.

- Let the metrics lead your way. Most people agree that marketing is a combination of art and science. Having clearly-defined metrics will ensure your costs are in alignment with the projected returns. Pick a few key conversion metrics that represent your customer and that increase value to you and increase your value to your customer.

- Use analytics to make decisions. Test different pages, messaging, keywords and use conversion metrics to determine which ones are working and which don’t.

- PR is often overrated. Find creative ways to create higher returns on a low budget. PR can be very helpful but it comes at a steep price and it’s ineffective if your product is not ready or it sucks. WOM is extremely effective for marketing on a shoe-string budget. Some quick and dirty (and cheap ways) to build buzz - daily blogging by employees, hire out-of-work writers to write up your PR, hand out funky t-shirts, or any other creative giveaways to get folks talking about your business/product.

- Make sure your product is ready and your marketing campaign is effective. Get statistically relevant data on your customer, iterate, and go to market quickly. Depending on how large your audience is, use the most effective medium. Word of Mouth is extremely effective in driving adoption on a bootstrap budget. Design your marketing campaigns to hit as many of these as following - High Volume (#), Low Cost ($), High Conversion (%).

- Great buzz isn't everything. Last but not the least, remember that great buzz doesn’t necessarily mean it will translate to online activity that you want. So don’t go crazy on just creating buzz, make sure you focus on whether it also translates into activity that you want.

PS: Check out Dave McClure’s blog for some great content (He’s brilliant!!!) 

Entrepreneurs, get ready for TiEcon 2008

I am looking forward to the TiEcon 2008 in May. Organized by TiE - The Indus Entrepreneurs and touted as "the World’s Largest Conference for Entrepreneurs!", it offers leading-edge speaker sessions, entrepreneurship bootcamps, insightful panel discussions, and terrific networking with fellow entrepreneurs and VCs. Last year's event was fantastic and this year should be even better.

While, I think both the websites are very circa 2000 and should be optimized to make them more 'social/web 2.0-friendly', I have to admit that I really like their marketing this year.

Here's an email I received from them. It's personalized and it's from an entrepreneur who was successful in raising money at TieCon 2007. I think this email is a great example of how to use WOM. It's obvious that TiE understands its audience and that's a newbie entrepreneur. What do you think a fledgling venture is most concerned about? Bingo! The email's not from some admin or event-planning monkey (no offense to the organizers). This came from a living, breathing, and (most importantly) funded entrepreneur, now that's more powerful than any marketing spin.

 

I've blogged about some of the panels from TieCon 2007, in case you want to check them out before you decide.

Web 2.0 - Redefining How We Live and Socialize Online and Offline 

Building and Monetizing online communities 

Here's an interview with Meg Whitman, ex-CEO of eBay, who was the Keynote speaker at TieCon 2007 (Warning: poor video quality)

13year old Entrepreneur looking for funding