Hey, it’s Erik - here to serve you with more fresh takes on marketing, growth and tech.
Starting with ~Tesla - who just fired their entire marketing team. 😳
… moment of silence ….
How did that happen?
Historically, Tesla has been adverse to advertising, stating they “never needed ads to sell cars”. This was Elon's growth loop:
Build your personal brand as an outspoken CEO
Build the first desirable EV
Have more demand than supply
Become your own marketing channel (which feeds back into point 1.)
This allowed Tesla to open the EV market. Right now 20% of all new cars sold worldwide are EV’s!
Most of that growth is coming from China though. 🇨🇳 In fact, Chinese companies are absolutely hammering Tesla, and it's reflected in the Tesla stock price. Which is down almost 40% from its peak in summer last year. 📉 Musk finally caved to shareholder pressure and said:
"Let’s try a little advertising and see how it goes.”
Cut to April 2024 - and Elon isn't happy with results, because the ads are too generic and ‘could’ve been for any car’. Which led to 40 people losing their job.
Do you agree? Take a look 👀
Besides generic ads and fierce competition, there is another elephant in Tesla’s room. 🐘
… the declining quality of their brand perception -
… which is heavily connected to the brand that is Elon Musk. His tweets still have more impact on Tesla stock than any marketing team ever could.
Growth law of the week
➡️ “Start with Outbound”
Outbound marketing uses channels where you proactively push your message to an audience, like paid advertising, direct mailing or outbound sales. Startups should begin with these channels, because they produce results instantly. They also deliver immediate feedback: you will know within days whether your or resonates or not - unlike inbound channels like content marketing or SEO, where feedback takes months, rather than days.
— Pieter
Lessons in growth
(1) Embracing chaos 💥
Having helped dozens of fledgling companies scale, we at Double have a special appreciation for entrepreneurs navigating the startup seas.
Even at wildly successful companies, the first few years are gut-wrenching, uncertain, on the brink of collapse, where pessimism is realism, and yet optimism is required.
We often look to companies like HubSpot as great examples, but it took HubSpot 2 years to get to their first 500 clients. Say what?
This blog puts things into perspective:
(2) Communication Laws 🎓 (via Jason Fried)
Osmo Wiio was a Finnish researcher who studied human communication. His laws are the human communications equivalent of Murphy’s Laws.
Wiio's laws state...
If communication can fail, it will.
If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm.
There is always somebody who knows better than you what you meant by your message.
The more communication there is, the more difficult it is for communication to succeed.
Anytime there are two people conversing, there are actually six people in the conversation:
Who you think you are
Who you think the other person is
Who you think the other person thinks you are
Who the other person thinks they are
Who the other person thinks you are
Who the other person thinks you think they are.
5 things we consumed this week
Orange Tompouce 👑 celebrating King’s Day with our Amsterdam crew.
Taking responsible risks as a growth-stage company. - by Louise
300+ landing page examples from top newsletters - including their conversion rates and main traffic sources.
7 things to steal from Katelyn Bourgoin's $750K a year newsletter -> (# 6 is why most newsletters fail.)
Hate Read - a glorious collection of finely crafted rants about absolutely everything.
Spaces our nerds are watching 👾
A running office debate: Is real estate actually a good investment, in the long term?
Public opinion is that house prices will grow indefinitely in the long run. But maybe this is not the case at all. Thomas Pueyo argues against this common belief. As he points out - market trends also have biases, narratives and branding. It's good to spot those, as they fuel many business ideas and marketing messaging. Standing out, could start with finding the biases in the market.
~Wise launched their first global creative campaign to build brand awareness and tell people they exist. They realised they can't just rely on organic WOM and referral anymore.
According to the CMO:
“What we’ve come to realise is that in most markets, a lot of people don’t know who we are. The people who do know who we are love us and tell their friends – and that’s driven a lot of growth to date,” he adds, explaining 60% of its growth has come from a combination of organic word of mouth and its invite referral programme.
This ad for Australia has so much going on, I wonder if the prospective audience ‘gets it’…
By comparison, here’s one from a year ago. Less exciting, but it does explain the product value better.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Leaving you with this hilarious ad by ~Uber.
"You can rent it for free, because I am very rich already" — Valtteri Bottas
Personal opinion: the best ads happen when two worlds collide.
Thanks for reading. See you next week!
Erik — on behalf of Double