Your marketing doesn’t need to be large scale
By Osama Masood
When we study copywriting, advertising, and marketing, one thing we are always told is “what works”. What works stands at the core of the copywriting we do, it stands at the marketing campaign we design, it even stands at the center of the advertising campaign we design. But what works is is the safe option that no one talks about which is the most unsafe option you can use to grow and eventually thrive your company.
If you’ve ever come up with a hunch, it’s always down to a situation in your life, where you faced hardship, and you thought of a better way of doing that. That is The Hunch. The Hunch is the reason why you decided to establish your technology company in the first place. Technology enables us to be able to do things for humanity and solve problems that we could not have solved previously.
When we design our product it’s down to a purpose, it’s down to solving a problem, it’s down to a person, just like you, who has a problem in his life. Why is it that when we are designing technology it’s always down to the issue, but when we are marketing our product it’s always down to how many people we can reach?
I suggest that it’s always down to insecurity about our work and the culture we exist in. We see these companies who are big and successful and we always assume that they got big because they had a large marketing budget, a large enough organic following, recognition, and a lot of money. But all these things are secondary. It turns into a chicken and egg problem if you let it go too far.
The fact is that these companies aren’t marketing to everyone. They have a large audience because they are at the end of the technology adoption cycle and you’re just at the beginning. What is a technology adoption cycle you might ask?
The following graph is called the technology adoption life cycle and this is what tells you, where a company is in terms of its adoption phase.
Just a small definition of continuous products and disruptive products will make your understanding of your idea or company clearer.
Continuous Product A product that can fit into existing technological infrastructure seamlessly eg. iPhone 12 Discontinuous Product A product that does not fit into existing technological infrastructures eg. Early Days of Tesla
Knowing where you stand within the technology adoption life cycle will make your life much easier when it comes to identifying your target customer, finding the right brand strategy to communicate to the target customer, and forming a customer relationship that suits where we stand within our technology adoption life cycle.
The Butterfly Effect
The technology adoption life cycle to me is nothing more than the butterfly effect. If the flap of the wings of a butterfly can cause a storm, your disruptive product is nothing more than a flap of a wing in the early stages of the technology adoption life cycle, and it is nothing less than a storm by the end of the cycle.
In the beginning, your customer is nothing more than a technology enthusiast, or a geek who’s willing to look for the cutting-edge product that no one else has. Recognizing their emotional needs, you need to not portray your company as popular, but embracing your identity as undiscovered and revolutionary will entice your early customers to hold you as precious, and to wear you like a crown.
If you’re just starting out, you don’t need a high marketing budget, you don’t even need to be ashamed that you’re small. The fact is that during the early phase of the technology adoption life cycle, your identity is what the people resonate with, your identity is the flap of the wing and you should be proud of that.
The end of the storm
I’m going to make a really bold prediction here. Gasoline cars are going to die. It’s nothing new, everyone says that but I’m saying it here for a reason to demonstrate the end of the storm. When Tesla Motors was launched, it didn’t have any supporting infrastructure to make electric cars a reality, but they built regardless, for the few people in the beginning who were sharing their vision of electric cars. Through various turbulence and problems, convincing people to shift from gasoline to electric, everyone thought it was all going to be in vain. Electric cars are too expensive, badly built, difficult to adopt, these were the things that we got to hear when we were talking about electric cars. As the company went through the different stages of the technology adoption life cycle, the tides began to turn, slowly competition started to take notice. Mercedes, BMW, GM, everyone started to take notice and started making an electric version of their gasoline cars. This is still calm before the storm. Here is where the story goes from factual reality to predict the storm. As the adoption of electric vehicles continues, it becomes more and more difficult to justify the use of gasoline cars and where it becomes too inconvenient to own gasoline. They’re too expensive, hard to maintain, bad for the environment, and too difficult to adopt. These are the things you are hearing as the storm that was promised finally arrived when the butterflies flapped their wings.
Embrace where you’re at. Don’t get involved in the numbers game.
Osama is the principal of Knightsburg, a brand strategy firm that helps tech companies become admired brands.
