09 Oct What a best-in-class modern business looks like
What if I said to you that you could buy the most innovative product on the market, that is a genuine improvement on an established category, that actually delivers on its promise and costs only 10% of the value of its components. You’d be interested right?
What if I then explained when you go to buy it you get a 10% discount without asking, that it’ll be delivered in less than 4 hours (for free) and that as part of your purchase the business will make a charitable donation on your behalf? You’d be keen to find out more.
What if I then told you that post-purchase, this business honoured the delivery time promise, arrived in a packaging solution you’d be wowed by, had an unexpected free gift included and if you are in some bizarre way not satisfied, they will collect the product free of charge and give you a full refund within 120 days? You’d think: this sounds too good to be true.
Well it is true, and I know because I experienced all of the above when I bought a Koala mattress online. What is more they are not going out of business by offering all these amazing things, far from it, they are one of the fastest-growing businesses around (securing $1M in sales in their first 80 days of existence and predicting $12M within their first year). They are now planning international growth.
So what of their ‘marketing’? They launched last year with a video, shot on a phone, which has a man jumping on one side of the mattress and not spilling the glass of red wine perched on the other side. This “see-it-to-believe-it” content piece received over 340K views (which is good for a start-up but not amazing) and they did some announcement ads on bus sides. Their re-targeting online is a little too active for my taste but standard behaviour from online conversionists nowadays.
This is the point. Their success has nothing to do with their ‘advertising’ and everything to do with how well they understand their customers and their category. They are winning by marketing through their innovative product offer, quirky personality, charitable nature, disruptive packaging and the buying experience itself. These are the tenets for a successful modern business, adding up to a value exchange which is worthy of advocacy. As evidenced by this post.