Dare to be an alebrije company: How entrepreneur One of the tools that you should know how to use the most to lead your company or startup to success is the marketing. However, although it may seem to you that designing marketing strategies is something that anyone can do, in reality it is an entire discipline that requires prior theoretical knowledge, experience gained over the years, creative ability and a lot of sensitivity to understand the market.
For that, in this article I am going to present you the seven best marketing strategies most used by experts such as Seth Godin, Wally Olins, Kevin Roberts, Martin Lindstrom, Paul MacLean among others.
How to be an alebrije company?
1. Brand building strategy
Creating a brand should not be taken lightly. The first important move you should make is to develop a brand strategy aimed at creating value, which is based on the experiences and stories that will bathe your company in emotions. Start by creating a memorable name when naming your company, which does not exceed 8 to 10 letters that form a single new word that can be registered with the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) and that has a domain available on the internet such as .com or .mx.
Mix words that describe the most important emotions of your business as qualifying verbs or adjectives; Play with different languages until you find one that makes sense to you and sounds interesting phonetically, and always compare yourself to big brands like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Nike, Audi , etc. Remember that marketing is a war of perceptions, not realities (it’s the foam on your cappuccino).
2. User experience strategy
The consumer experience is everything. Therefore, you should always try to create strategies based on improving the lives of your clients. Your product or service should be like a fantastic trip where your customers enjoy using your brand as an escape from their stress, where they have fun and enjoy experiential comfort.
Always imagine that your product is a fantastic amusement park or a delicious gourmet dish, because this way you will have to captivate your customers daily. Remember that in marketing we say that “it doesn’t matter what you sell, but how you sell it.”
3. Model strategy AUTHOR
Although in marketing nothing is written (that is, the limit is your imagination), you always have to follow a path that will help you achieve an adequate sales strategy. Here come the six steps of the so-called strategy AUTHOR (for its acronym in English):
Awareness
Create brand awareness in the minds of your consumers; Launch a communication program where your entire target market listens and observes your brand so that they talk about it and always have it in their heads.
understanding
You should not only focus on letting people know your brand, but also on communicating what your company does and how you can help them improve their lives. A very common problem among entrepreneurs and businessmen is that they assume that all their potential clients understand what their company’s mission is, and this is where the strategy is lost. Create a slogan and several taglines that help communicate the objective of your business in a creative and easy-to-digest way.
trials
What you can’t try, you can’t buy. A basic rule when launching new products is to give it to your first customers so that they can use it and see how it can improve their lives. Look for your first 50” early adopters “, who will be the first consumer influencers for other users. Get them to try and share your first products and use them as opinion leaders so they can share their experience with others. You can commonly see this strategy on the internet with the typical “30-day trial” or in shopping centers when they give you a free trial of a product.
Happiness
Seeking people’s happiness is the most important thing, since, by keeping them happy, you have won them over, and that is when they become clients because they start paying you for what you created.
Happiness is a two-way path; It is a win-win business as it must be mutual between client and company. Only then can you improve the world, just as Steve Jobs thought when creating fantastic products that improved people’s lives.
Only One
Once you find the happiness of your clients, you achieve their loyalty towards your brand, and that will make your company a magical space full of energy where everything will flow like water (from money to the good vibes of your clients, collaborators, shareholders and directors). Remember that it is always better to invest time and money in your current clients than in getting new clients.
Referral
When users are loyal to your brand, they automatically become ambassadors of it as they will begin to speak well of you and recommend your products around the world. This way you won’t have to invest a lot of money in advertising because you have injected capital into your customers, and they will reward you with loyalty and recommendations. That is why in a digital marketing strategy what you should look for most is not a “Like”, but a “Share”.
4. Positioning strategy
Much is said about the positioning of a brand, but most people do not know the true meaning of this expression. Positioning is nothing more than achieving a space in the minds of our consumers and making our brand synonymous with some positive association for them. For example, how Rolex is a luxury watch for successful people or Apple has to do with very high quality innovative technology.
As a recommendation, I suggest that you profile your market segment very well so that you can perfectly orient your value proposition and culminate in a key positioning, and that it does not happen to you like brands that have gone bankrupt for not knowing how to identify with a target market, like General Motors, who did not know whether to sell luxury cars like Mercedes Benz or compete with low price like Toyota.
To avoid problems, I recommend using and designing two basic marketing tools:
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP): It is the promise of value that you make to your customers that your competition does not.
- Sustainable Competitive Advantage (SCA): It is what you do better than others and that you can keep doing it for the life of your company. Be careful, low price is never a viable sustainable competitive advantage; Better focus on creating great value.
5. Strategy Love Marks
We already saw that creating happiness in our consumers is very important, but creating love is reaching another level. Kevin Roberts, creator of this concept, mentions that what moves human beings is not reason, but emotion, and that there are three factors that make a brand become loved like Apple, Amazon, Coca-Cola. , Disney and others.
- Mystery: To create love, you must first have a story that generates emotions in people. For example, when you read a book or watch a movie they can captivate you if, and only if, they keep you interested due to the mystery they create around the story. Use the short story format to create a fun story for your brand.
- Sensuality: In addition to telling a fun story, you must be extremely sensual with your clients, and for this you must use the five senses of the human being to captivate them. Enhance their emotions with holistic experiences, sell through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch and remember that your customers are human beings who need to be motivated from their senses.
- Privacy: Being intimate is a challenge that requires dedication and sincere feelings.
The first rule is to change the word “customer” to “friend”, in this way, you break all the psychological barriers when offering a product. Treat your consumer as if he were the best of your friends and you will see how your sales increase quickly.
6. Neuromarketing strategy
According to Dr. Paul MacLean, successful companies managed to convince the consumer’s three brains, and to do this you have to know and understand what each of them is and how they work.
Consent
This brain also called Neo Cortex. It is the newest of all and only human beings have it since our analytical and logical part is housed here. However, for marketing it is the least important, since we know that 85% of the purchasing decision is purely emotional, and only between 2 and 5% of acquisitions are made entirely analytically. For this reason, an advertising campaign that focuses all its efforts on communicating only the functional advantages of the products is usually a great failure.
Subconscious
The limbic brain is where all emotions are housed such as joy, sadness, trust, fear, anger, surprise, among others. These are a great source of inspiration for advertising creatives since they are easy to stimulate through subliminal messages that go directly to people’s subconscious. Hence the marketing saying that emotion kills reason.
Unconscious
The reptilian brain is the oldest of all. Here the basic instincts of all animals are stored, including those of humans. If emotion kills reason, instinct kills the other two. According to Martin Lindstromen his book Buyology, the way to decode what consumers think when in front of a product or brand is by studying what instinct is activated at that moment. For that there is the tool of neuromaketing, which is the union between neurosciences and marketing.
In this context, the most important thing is to know if our brand stimulates an instinct that drives the purchase of our product, such as protection, survival, reproduction, feeding, paranoia, fighting, etc.
7. Alebrije company strategy
Alebrijes are mythical characters taken from ancient Mexican stories that represent luminous species formed by parts of various animals such as the head of a tiger, the wings of an eagle and the tail of a lion, and that represent a supreme being or super animal capable of doing things that most of animals cannot do.
Innovation should always be part of your marketing strategy. The only way to remain in the market longer is by giving more and better values to your consumers; values that truly solve problems and make their lives easier.
The Alebrije strategy is about mixing the best of different worlds, creating a new, more revolutionized one. Like these characters, innovative companies are mixtures of two or three different industries that create a new super industry. This is the case of Apple, which mixes computers with cell phones, or Cirque du Soleil, which combines circus with theater. These mixtures made them winners of a new industry category.
You can do the same in your company. Analyze what would happen if you mixed two different types of companies in your category and you would deliver greater and more striking value to your customers (this is called innovation).
I really hope that these seven strategies are of great help to your company or business and help you reach another level. Don’t forget that the most important thing in your business life is to create value for your clients, collaborators and partners.