In his paper A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow outlines how we think in relation to external and internal factors.
In the business world, there is a similar concept called the Customer Buying Hierarchy. The hierarchy is outlined as:
Functionality
Reliability
Convenience
Price
Interestingly, a few things come out of the theory.
1. When it comes to buying, price is the last thing that a consumer cares about
2. A product that is simple to use has more money earning potential
3. The lowest grade product is one that has lots of features that nobody uses. It’s unreliable, hard to use and expensive.
4. On the other hand, the ultimate product is free and does what the customers want in a reliable and easy to use manner.
What is an example of the ultimate product? Google search. In the online consumer world, none can compete with Google search in terms of functionality, reliability simplicity and price. Hence, if Google search is free, how can you possibly charge for your consumer product online?
This forces companies to focus on the online B2B market: creating values for other companies who are looking to buy what you offer. Examples of such companies are 37Signals, Campaign Manager, and Involver.
What are some innovative ways to charge consumers online? If more and more companies choose to ignore the consumer market, where will the innovation come from? Giant corporations only?
Free creates its own problems that stand in the way of innovation.
Restaurants are more than just a place to dine. It’s a social platform. Every day, social events are held in restaurants – couples go on dates, friends socialize, business people meet…
It’s time restaurant owners rethink how they approach their business and monetize on their social platform. Take a more active role in bringing customers together.
Do you have a promotion in your restaurant? Why not create events for your customers?
Host social events where the food is center stage. Target local photographers. Organize a photography competition event. Get them to take pictures of your new dish and submit to local newspapers or your website.
Do you have peak and off-peak hours? Create an event for the off-peak hours. Offer your customers an incentive to come back when your restaurant is less busy.
Create a sampling event for local food critics and bloggers. Get them to sample your new menu and blog about it.
Create food events. Call it the taste of Shanghai. Become the center of the food scene in your market segment.
Promotional events are great ways to do marketing in the restaurant industry. But where can you find such service? Check out my company TrAvid.
I hate remembering random facts. I remember back in my school days, I had a lot of trouble with them. It turns out that there are a few memory tricks that you can use to remember these arbitrary information. I will talk about two of them, and how they are related to data structures in computer science.
I will start by talking about linking. Linking is used to remember a sequence of words or facts. Here is how linking can be used:
Linking method has 3 steps:
1. Create your sequence: this is where you look at the sequence of words that you want to remember.
2. Symbolize each object in the list: this is where you form the mental image of the objects in step 1.
3. Create your link: this is where you link two adjacent objects together with an exaggerated or ridiculous image. The more ridiculous the image, the better. We tend to remember our emotions, and ridiculous images set off emotions.
If you are familiar with computer science, you can think of linking as the process of forming a linked list. For the uninitiated, linked list is a data structure used in computer science to store data.
Here are the analogous steps for forming a linked list:
1. You have a collection of objects (random words) to be stored in a linked list
2. You store an image in each node
3. You set up a pointer pointing to the next node (by forming an ridiculous image).
Interestingly, our brains store information similar to how computers do. In the next part, I will talk about another method – Pegging, and how it is related to hash table.
The paradox of choice: Why more is less, and less is more.
Nowadays, people are overwhelmed with information. This signal vs noise problem keeps showing up everywhere.
In web design, preferences settings is consider a bad thing to have. Good designers make those decisions for their users.
“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.” – Steve Jobs
In consumer products, companies with fewer product types tend to do better. Consider GM vs BMW and Honda. More choices tend to confuse consumers. Another example is Mac vs PC.
In dating, because of the existence of online dating websites, people tend to become restless. Why settle when there are so many options out there to choose from?
A few years old, you have Reddit vs Digg. Reddit used to be my favorite website. The quality of stories used to be better with fewer categories. Now, I read hacker news. How long would it be before hacker news become like Reddit? Consider another example: Twitter usage. You can tell when someone is using Twitter as a marketing tool when he is following more than 200 people. Unless you have nothing to do, and reading tweets was your full time job, there is no way anyone could handle all that information overload. If you are following more than 200 people, you simply don’t read your Twitter tweets.
More is less. On the other hand, less is more. If I learned three words from more than one year of working on my startup TrAvid, this is it. Hence, the title of this blog.
jacqueline mclaughlin:
Jerry, you make an excellent point; the best companies have a product suite w/multiple price points to include a "free" offering. If you believe y
My name is Jerry Tian. I am the founder of TrAvid, an integrated web service for event organizers. I currently live in Vancouver, Canada. As a solo web entrepreneur, I spent more than one year bootstrapping my startup. This blog is about the lessons I learned along the way. You can follow me on twitter, and if you are in Vancouver, make sure to check out my meetup groups:
