Guy Kawasaki was the keynote yesterday morning for the Parallels Summit 2012 in Orlando. (Vodka bar was open at 8:20 AM!)
Guy talked about the key points from his book,Enchantment .
One is You Must be Likable. Richard Branson of Virgin is likable. He has a real smile- a Duchenne smile. A Duchenne smile leads to crow's feet. One factor in being likable is to accept others, no matter the color, politics, religion, looks, tattoos, etc. Have a YES Attitude. How can you help other people?
The second point was to Achieve Trustworthiness. In sales, people have to Like you and Trust you to buy from you.
Amazon, Zappos, and Nordstrom have established Trust, because they give customers trust first (with their return policy).
Guy spoke about Bakers. Be a Baker, not an Eater. Bakers know they can always bake more. Bakers are more trustworthy than eaters.
A way to gain trust: Agree on something. Start with that.
Point 3 was Do Something DICEE - Deep Intelligent Complete Empower Elegant
Enchant people with great stuff.
What goes into the ecosystem: software, docs, support, installation, webinars, follow-up, and more for a complete and total product system. More importantly a great customer experience (UX).
LIKE, TRUST, DICEE and LAUNCH.
Launch your product by Telling a Story. Guy says, "Plant many seeds." In other words, tell lots of people, because you have no idea how it will TIP.
Enchant the Influencers. You just don't always know who they are. kawasaki suggested reading Influence by Robert Cialdini. A point in that book was to Invoke Reciprocation. "I know you would do this for me."
Guy says that SXSW was what made Twitter tip (not the A-Listers who use it today).
When telling your story, stop talking tech - calories, MB's, CPU, etc. It's not about calories, but how many miles I have to run to burn it off. It's not how many GB's, but the number of songs or customer records or whatever that it will hold.
Kawasaki gave the example of My Key by Ford, which allows parents to program the car via the key they give their teenager - how loud the stereo can go and how fast the car can go. Great story. Good UX (user experience or benefits).
Another Point: Overcome Resistance by Re-Positioning the Story or by providing Social Proof. For the iPod, social proof was the white earbuds.
Sell the Dream, not the tech. What will it do? What will it be like to own it and use it? Use the technology to Enchant the audience. Social media is a way to enchant by providing value, information, insight, assistance. Social media also means fast, flat and frequent.
3 Pillars: Trust, Quality and Likability.
In the break-out session with Guy, he was asked about the commodity business (like web hosting, since we were at Parallels show. Parallels is a control panel for web hosting companies.) "If you truly believe it is a Commodity that you sell, You Lose." If YOU don't believe that there is something Unique or Valuable about your product -- or that the client is better off with YOUR service -- get out of the game. You can't win. Bah-bye!
Two images to look at: HERE and THERE. If you need help figuring out how to market in a hyper-competitive space, call my office at (813) 963-5884.
