Weekly Marketing Dip #1
Lamborghini's new logo in 20 years, when economists get it wrong & eclipse ads.
The best marketers are the ones who make the best judgement calls.
The question is, how might one get better at this?
(1) Reason by analogy. One way is to “steal like an artist”. Look at what other companies are doing, copy (some of) their strategy. This is a great tool to reduces risk. But it might make you vulnerable to diminishing returns of channels or tactics.
(2) Reason from first principles. Another option is to understand how the world really works. To recognise when history repeats itself, see how economic trends affect consumer behaviour, and play into human psychology.
There are enough newsletters to help you with tactics. Very few help you understand the world better.
That’s why, we’re launching a new weekly edition of our newsletter.
Here’s what you can expect:
Immutable growth laws
Disruptive industries to watch
In-depth books and articles
Hot takes 🔥
Don’t worry. You’ll still hear from Pieter every other week, with in-depth thoughts on marketing and business strategy.
Let’s dive in.
Growth law of the week
“Make growth your obsession”
Once you have more users, more revenue and more brand equity, all other problems become much easier to solve. Faster growth solves (nearly) all problems.
Growth and distribution should be your top priority, because getting users is harder than it seems. It is poor distribution—not product that is the number one cause of startup failure. Prioritise accordingly.
— Pieter
Lessons in growth
(1) Lamborghini changed its logo for the first time in 20 years (!)
It’s now flatter than their old logo, which helps it scale. The change is quite symbolic because they're one of the last brands to make this change. To make things worse it now looks like a Peugeot logo 😂
There are a few lessons to take away:
Luckily for Lamborghini, your brand is not your logo. Who wants a $200k Peugeot?
If you take 20 years to make "small" changes, you may have a problem.
(2) Brands are beating banner blindness with copy.
We’ve developed banner blindness for the standard newsletter sign-up forms. Banner blindness happens when our brains have learned to ignore information like ads or banners.
To beat this, brands are experimenting with attention-grabbing copy.
We say, it’s worth a try. One of our own clients, Glowforge, used "Sign up for free stuff". It outperformed every other bit of copy.
We wonder if the example below works 🤔
Things we’ve consumed this week
Uber outcompeted taxi companies because it got away with doing illegal things. And other ways startups out-compete incumbents.
This quote via Lenny’s interview with Jason Lemkin (SaaStr) on being honest about your GTM strategy and choosing sales vs. product-led growth:
“(When) you get those first 10, 15, 20 customers, be honest. If you've talked to them as a founder and you know that they need a sales type motion (...) and you say, "Hey, I don't like sales, so I'm going to do a PLG motion," you'll fail.”
How we make decisions. A list of 38 questions to ask when faced with a choice. Here are a few of our favorites:
Can we make the decision smaller?
Is any decision better than no decision?
Would another opinion help or hinder?
If the economy is doing so well according to economists, how come consumers don’t share this sentiment? Apparently, it’s because we’re measuring inflation wrong.
Spaces our nerds are watching 👾
Terraform Industries is the coolest company you might have never heard of (via Packy McCormick).
It's great to see how even deeptech companies like Terraform are starting to market directly to their audience. Videos like these are great, and it's so cool to hear the vision directly from the founder.
The next transformative revolution is here and it’s tiny (via Erik Drexler).
Nano-materials could mean that we can start shaping the material world in the same manner and size as we do now with the digital world.
We’ll just leave this here
Steven Bartlett from ‘The Diary of a CEO’ started out as a marketer. Yet, he managed to make this rookie mistake.
That wasn’t too bad for a first go, now was it? Leave us your thoughts and favourite links in the comments.
See y’all next week!
— Louise (on behalf of Double)
“Growth and distribution should be your top priority, because getting users is harder than it seems. It is poor distribution—not product that is the number one cause of startup failure.“
What does this look like in practice for startups not using PLG? Or startups targeting enterprise companies first?