Week 2 - Guerilla Marketing & Project Update

 There were a couple of points which came up in my research this week (reading Guerilla Marketing and Ascend your Startup) that have me rethinking my approach to business debut.  It won’t be enough to just share some pleasant landscape photography and describe experience activities – I need a legitimate assessment system to look at the feasibility and acceptability of potential venues.  In other words, what are the baseline, MVP products that I want to offer, and do they scale for patrons who might want more detailed or complex events?  Referencing the image below, I need to find the offering that fits into the middle of the diagram.


Image source. 


I’m brainstorming something a little outside the box – in line with tactics described in Guerilla Marketing.  Much of my current academic pursuits circle around leveraging the tech industry and social media to build an advertising system, so what if I applied the same to market research?  I could simultaneously conduct consumer outreach and advertising, while assessing interest levels regarding potential adventure tour venues.


Examples of online/social media quizzes. 


The idea here is to set up one of those social “quizzes” which supposedly tell you something about yourself.  Something like, “Are you a beach, mountain, woods or meadow type person?”.  My questions can revolve around discerning community interests (particularly those interests for people planning island vacations) and integrate links to my own site for more information.  Again, I’m just starting to think through the processes here, but I’m sure I can apply this in a manner that can both reach my target audience and gather vital details about what ideas would spark the most interest.  Now, this still leaves me to look at scalability and feasibility, but that’ll be built into my advertisement analysis strategy.  I’m slowly working through a legitimate execution plan here!


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 4 - Guerilla Marketing

Image
Ladies and gentlemen, we are presenting a chapter of Guerilla Marketing that is the bane of every procrastinator on the planet: COMMITMENT. Now don’t get me wrong, the idea here actually outlines an effective strategy to overcome such “personality deficiencies”, but it doesn’t mean it’s not extraordinarily, mind-numbingly, pulling-your-hair-out difficult for some people to execute.  I say this tongue in cheek, since I most certainly fall into the category.  I like to think of myself as “deadline-oriented” instead of a hopeless procrastinator. I spent at least an hour looking at memes for this image instead of finishing my blog today. "Image Source" . So, let’s talk about how we get around this.  Set multiple deadlines!  Yes, nothing crushes the soul of a procrastinator more than realizing that development milestones should have their own deadlines.  So how do we do that?  With a plan!  The book puts it in no uncertain terms; build a plan and commit to the plan.  That commitm
Read more

Week 7 - Guerilla Marketing

Image
I actually found Chapter 7 of Guerilla Marketing more of a textbook read, rather than something that has captured my interest in line with previous chapters.  This week’s review focuses on reducing costs and improving efficiency – reminiscent of “Lean Six Sigma” perspective in process management.  While obviously beneficial, I find the topic to be mind-numbingly boring. I would rather discuss efficiency in the same scope as the feedback loops described in the last two chapters.  Reevaluating marketing needs on a continuous (or at least periodic) basis as a reaction to changes in business operations or consumer sentiments/needs presents the best opportunity to improve efficiencies.  This might also include reductions in time, energy and money that was initially placed into the advertising strategy. Image Source. This seems pretty logical: the majority of the marketing strategic mission is completed in the planning and product roll-out portion of the product life cycle.  As the dust set
Read more

Week 6 - Ascend your Startup

Image
One of the toughest parts of managing business growth is quality assurance, and this is particularly difficult for young companies.  I’ve been mostly blogging about establishing, marketing and delivering a minimum viable product (MVP) for these companies – but eventually you’ll need to move on to specialized or niche products as well.  The same self-monitoring rules apply to future rollouts as that for the MVP.  There needs to accountability measures in place to ensure ongoing quality controls, as well as feedback mechanisms to “adjust fire” when needed. Image Source. Ascend your Startup recommends using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to establish targets and milestones for ongoing operations.  The principle is to create business objectives that align with, and further, your long-term business strategy while creating related, functional-area metrics (based on results, feedback or outputs) that indicate success on the way toward said objective. This parallels how I’ve been taugh
Read more