💡 JCNews #37
Faire d'une marque un culte.
Bonjour,
Chaque semaine, je partage quelques articles que j’ai trouvés particulièrement enrichissants. J’espère qu’ils vous aideront autant qu’ils m’ont aidé.
Cette semaine (entre autres) :
Le retour de snapchat
Oracle devient le “partenaire de confiance” de Tik-Tok US
Ro est valorisé à $1.5bn
Inscrivez-vous pour suivre la Keynote d’Alan en streaming
Healthy Business sort aujourd’hui 📚
Certains articles sont en français, la plupart sont en anglais (je copie certaines citations en anglais). Ils ne sont pas tous récents et vont au rythme de mes lectures.
Bonne lecture !
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📱Monde des technologies
👉 Oh Snap! 👻 : comprendre SnapChat et pourquoi ils vont remonter (Not Boring)
Worldbuilders have three things in common:
They predict something non-obvious about the way the world is moving before others see it and before the market is ready for their ultimate vision.
They create a wedge into the market and leverage it into a much larger opportunity. The public often ridicules or dismisses the initial wedge product.
They timestamp their vision, whether in public announcements or confidential documents. This 2018 company-wide memo from Spiegel clearly lays out (parts of) the plan, and this tweet from former Snapchat employee Lucy Guo shows that Spiegel has been working on recently-announced Snap Minis for at least four years.
Combined with the announcement of Local Lenses, soon millions of people in hundreds of apps will be able to digitally transform the physical neighborhoods in which they live and the way they appear in them. Spiegel highlighted his user growth strategy: don’t worry too much about attracting older users, just keep its users engaged while they get older and continue to attract new young users. In addition to the suites around Bitmoji and Camera, Snap also boasts Minis, Snap Map, Local Business Listings, Voice Control, Snap Originals, Happening Now, Ad Kit, Story Kit, Creative Kit, and Login Kit, and I’m sure I’m missing some. Snap might be the first American company to become a WeChat-style super app.
👉 La croissance de Revolut en 2019 pour atteindre plus de 10m d'utilisateurs. Intéressant de comprendre leur consommation de capital (CNBC)
The London-based start-up, which offers banking and trading services through an app, posted a total loss of £106.5 million ($139.6 million) for the year ending December 31, up from £32.9 million in 2018.
That was despite Revolut's revenues climbing 180% to £162.7 million from the £58.2 million it reported in 2018. The company also nearly tripled its user base in 2019 to 10 million from 3.5 million a year earlier.
"We increased daily active customers by 231% and the number of paying customers grew by 139%."
👉 Tik-tok rejette la proposition de Microsoft et choisit Oracle comme partenaire de confiance tout en gardant son code source confidentiel (CGTN) :
ByteDance will not sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to Microsoft or Oracle, nor will the company give the source code to any U.S. buyers.
Oracle, is reportedly gaining the upper hand as its negotiations for TikTok’s U.S. operations have intensified in recent days, according to a Wall Street Journal report on Sunday citing people with knowledge of the matter.
Oracle is going to be picked as TikTok’s “trusted tech partner” in the U.S., the report said. However, ByteDance will also not sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to Oracle.
🏯Construire une entreprise
👉 Comment créer une marque qui est un culte (Jordan Odinsky)
However, the psychology that drives the most successful cults can be incredibly powerful in brand building. There has been a meteoric rise in cult brands that play at a higher level than their peers; brands that infuse their followers with a great sense of pride and purpose who then go beyond rationality to see their brand win.
Notable companies such as Apple, Harley Davidson, Lululemon, and Tesla have paved the way for younger startups like Superhuman, Robinhood, Lemonade, Fast, and Lambda School, among others, to rise up and build an army of loyal followers.
Becoming a cult brand doesn’t happen by accident; in fact, it’s incredibly intentional.
Create An Enemy:
At the center of every cult brand is an enemy; a manifestation of spoken and subliminal messages, ideas, and beliefs that highlight how this brand is radically different from the rest.
Lemonade faced off against the traditional insurance industry, well-known for its misaligned incentives and painful claims process. Lemonade set the stage by delightfully challenging us to “forget everything we know about insurance.” (Sidenote: In late 2018, State Farm created an attack ad mocking the new wave of tech-forward insurance companies. While the ad didn’t name any particular brand, Lemonade took the initiative to insert themselves as the victim of State Farm’s attack. Lemonade’s genius quick thinking to play the “victim card” resulted in thousands of people fighting for them on Twitter, bashing State Farm, and joining as new followers and paying customers.)
Questions; Who’s The Enemy? Can you visualize the enemy? Is the enemy a well-known ideology, company, or individual that is despised or rarely admired by a core group of people? Is this brand radically different from the rest?
Build The Velvet Rope:
People feel most like themselves when they are part of a group; however, the initial drive to join a cult is to discover and clarify one’s individualism, not to find a sense of belonging among others.
When crafting a cult, brands often create a velvet rope, an exclusivity ring promoted by influencers or notable personalities who spread the gospel of the brand.
New members feel an internal surge of excitement and a sense of urgency to align themselves with their role models and idols. (more on that here)
Questions: How Thick Is The Velvet Rope? Which influencers are talking about the brand? At what rate are influencers onboarding other influencers, thus perpetuating a cycle of hype? Given the public persona of the brand, how likely is it that this will explode?
Sketch The Commitment Curve:
The more we invest in a cause, the more we feel a sense of belonging towards it.
The more new converts feel invested, the more they will fight for its success.
To map this out, brands often create commitment curves that visualize the roadmap of actions for new converts to take on their road towards becoming the ultimate brand fanatics.
In Lemonade’s commitment curve, they encourage converts to continuously interact with their radically different business model, quote and claims process, and delightful content. At each step of the curve, the convert gains more insight into the inner workings of the company and discovers more reasons to fall in love with the brand. Each interaction is carefully curated to highlight why Lemonade is radically different from the rest.
Lemonade also encourages converts to publicly share their impressions of the brand and how delightful it is (see here), which labels converts as early adopters, or even contrarians, that value the shake-up in the status quo
Questions: What’s Behind The Dots? Is there an irrational level of consumer loyalty? Are there clever opportunities to transform converts from followers to fanatics? Do converts stick up for the brand in public and make it their business to shower the brand with love every chance they get?
Another important metric is asking “who is the cult’s leader?” All good cults have a cult leader.
👉 Les conseils de Marc Andreessen pour les start-ups qui ont du mal avec leur distribution : ne baissez pas vos prix (Business Insider)
It has become absolutely conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that the way to succeed is to price your product as low as possible under the theory that if it's low-priced everybody can buy it and that's how you get the volume.
It's a problem called "too hungry to eat." "They don't charge enough for their product to be able to afford the sales and marketing required to actually get anybody to buy it. And so they can't afford to hire the sales rep to go sell the product," he said.
Probably the single number one thing we try to get our companies to do is raise prices," Andreessen said. "By the way, it's like, 'Is your product any good if people won't pay more for it?'"
🏥 Santé
👉 Ro, est valorisé à $1.5bn avec $250m de revenu après 3 ans, et essaie de transformer certains segments de la santé (CNBC)
The company, which started out by selling hair loss supplements and erectile dysfunction medication to men, has built a range of health apps and says it's now generating $250 million in annual revenue -- without taking insurance.
From there, the company introduced a women's brand called Rory, which delivers birth control, among other medications, and a smoking cessation service called Zero. It now has a medication delivery service called Ro Pharmacy, which delivers more than 500 generic medications at a flat fee of $5 each. To market itself to new patients, it built out a health content offering called Health Guides.
For each of these services, it provides patients with a remote care team. Unlike many telemedicine companies in the space, it focuses on areas of health care where patients are likely to have a repeat need and may need ongoing support, rather than the one-off sinus infections or urinary tract infections.
On the back-end, the company is also building software for its doctors so it's easy for them to see who's waiting in the queue -- and which patients are high priority at any given moment. Currently it has between 50 and 100 medical providers on board and about a third of them are on staff (the rest are on contract). The company hopes to change that by hiring more doctors and nurses full time.
📕📺Livres et séries
👉 The Men Who Built America: si vous voulez comprendre le capitalisme américain et la compétition poussée à l’extrême, vous devez regarder ce documentaire sur Vanderbilt, Rockfeller, Carnegie… et comment ils ont construit leurs empires.
💚 Les publications d’Alan et sur Alan
👉 Alan fait son Check-up (keynote.alan.com): rejoignez-nous (en streaming - COVID oblige) pour notre première keynote à Station F. Des annonces exclusives, une table ronde pour le lancement d’Healthy Business, la venue de Cédric O … et bien d’autres choses !
👉 Le travail asynchrone chez Alan (BSmart) : j’intervenais sur SMART JOB vendredi pour parler de notre politique de travaillez où et quand vous voudrez, de façon asynchrone.
📕Healthy Business sort aujourd’hui !