Recently I read read a book - “Shine Bright” by Rashmi Bansal. It has stories of people who were great intrapreneurs. One of the stories was about Manu Jain and how he launched Mi in India.
When he joined Mi, he used to work out of a cafe in Bangalore as he was the only employee. He planned to test the Indian market with 10k mobile phones and see the response. They partnered with Flipkart for this and planned a limited stock rollout. The phones were priced at almost 50% of what a phone with similar features was already available in India. Hence, they had good product at a cheaper price point. All the marketing happened though word of mouth and they had around 10k followers on their Facebook page. Which was the total seed audience.
It was expensive and a hassle to get phones in small batches from China to India. So, they chartered flights which would carry only Mi Phones.
And that is how Mi was launched in India. And on the D-day all the phones were sold in 2 seconds of the launch.
This was in 2014, when one could experiment launching an electronic brand without much thought given to the marketing communication.
Is it possible to do something like this today?
I think this is possible but with a lot more planning, investment and hard work. Because today competition is very high in the market. We need to look at many other aspects today before launching a business.
With increased competition for advertising and with customers having many product/ brand options, acquiring new customers and retaining them has become extremely difficult and expensive.
The competition & CPMs on Meta and Google are on an all time high. It has become extremely expensive to even reach a customer let alone acquire them. Marketing Communication has become one of the major aspects to look at along with the other aspects of the business like Product, Price, etc.
Today we need to go think deeply and evaluate the marketing costs when we are evaluating the startup idea itself. We need to think if it will be feasible for the business to bear marketing costs not just during the launch but for long term.
For most of the D2C businesses Marketing costs are equal (if not higher) to the COGS (cost of goods sold).
So today if we are planning to procure inventory worth X rupees, then we need the same amount (if not more) for marketing and acquiring the customers to sell that inventory.
Hence, we need to think about marketing when we are evaluating the business idea. And I am not talking about market research, competitor research, or anything that we usually do but - “How will you communicate with the customers and acquire them?”
To evaluate this, start writing a document which has the lunch announcement.
✅ Write a launch announcement - Email, WhatsApp Message, LinkedIn Post, etc. that you will send once you launch the product.
When you write this piece of content you are writing it for the customers who will read about the product for the first time. This will force you to think about the customers and how to explain them about the product. And then take a step further on how to convince them to buy the product.
This will also help you think deeply about the product and understand how to communicate about the product if you decide to pursue the idea.
It will give you an idea about the possible doubts or questions customers can have once they read the content.
You can even send this message to your friends and family and ask them what they think about the product and did they understand the offering. You will be surprised to get several questions and doubts that they have.
This will further help you refine the idea and also understand the customers and communication better.
Writing gives clarity and when you write this launch communication piece. You will get a sense of what doubts the customers can have which will help in refining the product and the offering. This way you will keep refining the product and content multiple times. Hence, when you start pursuing the idea you will have a lot of clarity about the product and when you decide to launch, you will have a refined version of content that you can actually use.
When you create content for email or WhatsApp, you have to be concise as there is character limit and customers usually scan rather than read. So this will give you an understanding about how you can communicate clearly with less words. If something needs too much of an explanation then, think- Are you launching something way before time? or How can you refine the communication further?
Once you write this you will also be able to segregate the content and understand what you want to communicate during different stages of customer buying journey - awareness, consideration or conversion. This will further give you clarity on what can be avoided from the communication all together. Which in turn will give you an understanding of which product feature is extremely important and which is not.
Writing this content can actually refine your readiness for the Product Market Fit (PMF) Stage, which in turn can reduce the number of experiments and the duration of the PMF.
Hence, if you are evaluating a startup idea, make sure to include this step in your process.