Driving to Market - V2! - How to "Drive" Competitive Advantage in your Go To Market (GTM) strategies and tactics for Startups - Harvard Innovation Lab Series

Editor's Notes

• #8: 67 Billion – business week 2009, most valuable brand in the world.
• #28: This is always a fun section. Entrepreneurs often claim they have no competition because the idea is so unique. While that may indeed be true, it’s unlikely that you won’t have competition for at least the dollars that the customer has to spend on either existing approaches or alternatives.So what helps here is to describe very clearly what your unique differentiation isThen be clear what barriers there are to others following you. Technology is one obvious differentiator to bring out, but don’t forget others For example your business model, which may include your pricing advantage or your open source development capability or your ability to partner and or open up new channels. Other sustainable advantages may include the network of users you build up or the data being collected.  In the end all these may be  as compelling as your technology differentiation, and more important as a barrier to entry for competitors.
• #29: There may be many ways to express your unique positioning, but I’m a believer in pictures - in case you hadn’t already figured that out ;) So here’s the kind of simple picture I recommend using to clearly position yourself. The key to this particular diagram is the axes you choose. Suffice it to say you want to end up in the top right, positioned to win in a unique whitespace. Here bubble sizing is for relative size of competitors a,b,c,d.Catch me in person and I'll tell you the real key is to find a way to explain why the competitors just can't cross the barriers in this diagram to even enter the top quadrant. Then you know you're really onto a winner.It's a subject unto itself for a drill down, but you need to be able to get across the white space you have identified
• #31: Disruptive to the industry and the competition and NOT the customer (remember the gain/pain ratio)
• #34: 5th U - Unique
• #37: a set of actual or potential customers for a given set of products or services who have a common set of needs or wants, and who reference each other when making a buying decision.Moore, Geoffrey A. (2009-03-17). Crossing the Chasm
• #81: W/ Inbound, success is much more about the width of your brain than the width of your walletTrad marketing – if you had money, you could buy customers through ads, buying lists, hiring a PR firm…every day those techniques work less and less well.Inbound marketing – You use your unique ideas and content to pull people in from se, tw, fb, etc.Inbound is about the width of your brain, not the width of your wallet! Rubbing braincells together, not rubbing greenbacks together.
• #82: With inbound, you succeed by creating your own marketing assets not renting space on someone else’s assets.Trad marketing – Here’s the way it works in trad marketing…every month, you take a pile of money and shovel into Google Adwords mouth…just like this. For every dollar in, you might get a dollar ten out, but it is a one time deal. Gotta do it again the next month.Inbound marketing – You create permanent assets that pull in links, twitter followers, fb fans, LI group members etc. Those assets never go away and continue to pull in customers for years and years. It grows like interest in your 401k accountInbound is about creating leverage w/ your marketing dollars.
• #83: With inbound, you succeed by loving up your marketplace, not irritating your marketplace.I have a guy at a Software QA co that cold calls me every Monday and Thursday at 8:07am…not only is that technique not effective, but it is ruining his co’s brand.You want your potential customers to love your brand and talk about them like LuLuLemon, Whole Foods, or Charity Water.
• #84: 1st part is content…need to think of yourself as a content creation studio – cnn, hbo, pbs.
• #85: remarkable
• #90: NOTE: Bottom half of funnel
• #96: Imperial Palace
• #97: Assets – not inventory, machine tools, etc…links, ranks, reach.
• #105: In a perfect world, we would hope that we could take our suspected market directly to purchase in one step.
• #106: That would be like hoping we could simply put up a web site and expect that people would just find it and immediately buy our product.