Volume 15: Wrong Zoom, brilliant Tesla & Harry can’t manage up.
1. Investors pile into wrong Zoom, double its value.
Tl;dr: What’s in a name?
Even with the threat of a global pandemic and the stock market tanking, bets will always be made on what looks like a sure thing. With analysts claiming that Zoom has added more new customers in the first two months of 2020 than in all of 2019, there’s clearly money to be made.
Unfortunately for some less-than-diligent investors, the ticker symbol ZOOM isn’t for the video conferencing company at all (that would be ZM) but a small Chinese manufacturer of cell-phone parts that I’m guessing has been pretty baffled by its stock price movements in recent days.
Anyway, back to the other Zoom, they’ve seen a 38% increase in value over the last month and they’re reporting Q4 results in two days. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens and see if they’re one of the long-term winners from our current predicament.
2. I hate to burst your bubble, but Tesla is a brilliant marketing company.
Tl;dr: When otherwise intelligent people say utterly dumb things.
Last week I was at a dinner where I met a wealthy tech-entrepreneur all decked out in Patagonia, who proceeded to rant and rave, with much flying spittle, about how much better the world would be without marketing. Just as I considered stabbing myself with a steak-knife to make it stop, he ended with the pronouncement that “I love my Tesla because they don’t do any marketing, period!”
Realizing there was no escape from this hell, I ordered a stronger drink and chose to engage. “Actually, Tesla is a brilliant marketing company. Literally everything they do is marketing. Let’s walk through that shall we…”
And it really is a brilliant marketing company. It entered the EV category with an aspirational product when everyone else was messing about with comedy compacts. It priced in line with luxury marques to reinforce aspirational status and with the knowledge that it’s much easier to move down the pricing ladder than it is to move up (take that blitzscalers). It put its stores in high-end retail locations to reinforce their luxury status and benefit from the novelty of being the only car company among the likes of Apple and Louis Vuitton. And finally, it has the PT Barnum of our age handling promotional duties.
If you don’t think any of that is marketing, look closer. The 4Ps of product, price, place and promotion have been the backbone of marketing education since the early 1960s and, so far, Tesla has proven to be very, very good at them.
3. “Just Harry” terrible at managing up.
Tl;dr: Sussex Royal is royal no more.
I applaud Harry and Meghan for giving up their royal status. She’s been treated extra-appallingly by a British tabloid press that was also responsible for the death of his mother. I’m pretty sure that I’d be cutting and running for Canada under these same circumstances too.
But what’s most interesting about all of this is how terribly Harry seems to have managed to get along with his boss, the Queen. Granted, working for your grandmother must be difficult, but he’s been doing it for over 30 years, so you’d think he’d have figured it out by now.
After a lifetime of Royal bureaucracy working on his behalf, Harry now faces the distinctly novel experience of having it work against him, and he and Meghan are not impressed. After being informed that they can’t use their much touted “Sussex Royal” trademark, they responded a little childishly via press release that the queen doesn’t control the word Royal outside of the UK. So not only can’t they manage up, they’re not doing so great in the ‘never burn your bridges’ stakes either.
4. Know what? You should definitely be differentiating for the sake of it.
Tl;dr: Maybe being different is kind of the point.
I was invited to take part in a pitch last week that included the digital product experience. It was all very sensible, thoughtful and intelligent stuff, but when we got to the part on differentiation, the statement that we shouldn’t differentiate for the sake of it made me pause. Why were we talking about differentiation as if it were a mere feature when it should really be a core tenet?
When Coca-Cola created their iconic bottle, the goal wasn’t to create something almost the same as the competition, it was to “create a bottle so distinct that you would recognize if by feel in the dark or lying broken on the ground.”
Now, I know digital experiences aren’t bottles, but they do serve a very similar purpose in our modern world, and it would be quite the thing to have a digital product become as iconic and long lasting as the Coca Cola bottle. Which means that when we say things that sound sensible like not differentiating for differentiation’s sake, we really need to take a step back and consider the commoditizing consequences.
Maybe what we should be saying is “let’s absolutely differentiate for differentiation’s sake” because being different, distinctive and unique compared to the competition is actually kind of the point.