I have seen many times when products are almost the same as different brands but some brands get the unfair advantage of customer loyalty and advocacy. How do they do it? Especially after the dawn of the internet era, how have things changed?
Honesty
Gone are the days when marketers were all liars. Now you can lie and get a customer once (that’s also hard, thanks to Google) but hardly will they come back. I have written a dedicated newsletter feature on how some brands like Man Matters are practising it by saying that their products “won’t work overnight and isn’t magic“.
I personally had an experience this week when we were shopping for a new TV.
At the first retail shop we visited, the salesman was too pushy about a brand that was not well known. Whenever I asked about some other brands that I like, he always manipulated the conversation to that particular brand he was pushing. It was obvious that he will get more commission out of that brand, he was not being honest at all.
That really pushed me to go to another shop, where I had a totally different experience.
We really like a particular TV and wanted to go ahead with it, then the salesman at the new shop went on to say that it’s the last piece and they will have to ship to us the piece that was on display for a couple of months. He added that he could have totally hidden the fact and could have shipped it. He also got us some discounts for the same reason. What a good feeling, definitely I’m going back to that store next time.
Community
Humans are social animals, evolutionary we lived in tribes. Anyone who didn’t act in accordance to the best of the tribe was considered an outlier, anyone who helped out the tribe get more pride and protection was considered a hero and a leader. With the internet and especially Web 3.0 (Blockchain & Crypto) becoming the now and the future, this innate human sense of community is becoming stronger, without geographical boundaries but forming tribes of similar interests.
A good example is FTTR, which started as a health community on WhatsApp now become a fully-fledged startup with 200k+ users and have raised 11.5 Million in funding recently. Bluelearn is another emerging example I’m observing which also started as a WhatsApp community for college students to learn stuff outside of college and then grew into a platform that now got backed by Lightspeed VC. Discord is a brilliant tool to scale the brand’s community. If you have time, learn about DAOs which are super exciting that’s happening in the crypto space.
Story/Founder
People are building in public now. People want to get involved with startups that have a visionary founder and are working for something that they are so damn passionate about. Kunal Shah is almost as famous as CRED, Elon Musk could be even popular than SpaceX.
Ashwajeet Singh, who is one of the co-founders of the D2C brand Owl Coffee takes it even further by asking opinions of the users to create new packaging
A Note: I wanted to conduct a workshop on Linkedin for a long time now. Now I got an opportunity to do it via our new initiative called Blusteak Academy.
This year for me was phenomenal and I have to thank Linkedin for most of it. Reason number one: I was selected as one among Linkedin's Top Voices 2021. The other being Linkedin helped me to generate 1 CR worth of converted leads for our agency.
Hence, I wanted to share my experience with my fellow entrepreneurs. Doing it by conducting a 1-hour webinar on the topic of Generating Leads Using Linkedin on 19th of December at 11 AM
Hoping to see you all there. Register now (Only limited seats):