Guerric

We can all agree that:

– Creating something is easy.
– Creating something that people care about (your minimum viable audience) is much more difficult.

The problem?

Most attempts to launch new products are based on a “cool idea for a product”. And then, a marketing team has to figure out how to sell this new concept.

Products are born this way because it’s less demanding to start with a product idea than with what your audience may want.

That’s the wrong way to develop new propositions.

In the words of Seth Godin:

“You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your customers.”

— Seth Godin

In this article, you’ll learn about the importance of defining your minimum viable market first.

And how to identify it.

A challenge: There’s no such thing as the mass market

It’s tempting to have the ambitious objective to serve a big market–the mass market.

But who’s the mass market? What do they want? What can you do for them?

Who is the average pilot?

In the 50s, the U.S. Airforce was trying to improve the design of the cockpit.

The ambition was to find the size of the average pilot to make sure that every pilot could fit well into a standardised cockpit.

They needed data.

So they gathered the size data from 4,063 pilots and computed the average of the 10 physical dimensions believed to be most relevant for the new design–incl. height, arm length, and chest circumference.

Next, they compared the data size of each individual pilot–one by one–to the average pilot.

The result?

Big surprise!

Out of 4,063 pilots.. well.. not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions!

For example, one pilot might have a longer-than-average leg length, but a shorter-than-average arm length.

There was no such thing as an average pilot.

If you design a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’re actually designing it to fit no one.

Bottom line: Trying to please everyone requires to dilute so much what makes your proposition unique that you’ll end up appealing to nobody.

A solution: Focus on your Minimum Viable Audience

Creating a meaningful proposition requires to be specific.

If you want to make a difference for the audience that you serve, you must know them well.

The solution is to start by focusing on a Minimum Viable Audience.

Minimum (or Smallest) Viable Audience: A better way of approaching marketing

A minimum viable audience is the smallest possible market you can serve and that can sustain your business as it grows.

It’s about targeting the people who will particularly benefit from what you are offering.

In This Is Marketing, Seth Godin shares his definition of the smallest viable market:

“Begin instead with the smallest viable market. What’s the minimum number of people you would need to influence to make it worth the effort?”

There’s a real advantage:

When you focus on a smaller market, you can make sure you serve them well. You can make a bigger impact on their lives, especially when you’re just launching a new product.

It always starts with a small market: The 100 customers who love Airbnb

Airbnb didn’t start with millions of customers.

They started focusing on making sure they could get 100 customers who loved their proposition.

This was their minimum viable audience.

“It was better to have 100 people who loved us vs. 1 million people who liked us. All movements grow this way. There was no way we could get 1 million people on Airbnb, but we could get 100 people to love us.”

– Brian Chesky, Founder & CEO of Airbnb

Being so specific helped the Airbnb team to create a proposition that people loved.

They didn’t go for the average.

They focused on making a big difference for a small pool of customers.

The rest is history.

If you’re interested in more details about how to find your minimum viable audience, here’s the link to The Value Mix.

It’s about being their best option

When everything is one click away, we only care about the best.

People don’t want an average T-shirt. They want the best T-shirt.

This is what I realised when I started GoudronBlanc in 2012.

But how could I offer the best T-shirt?

I had to pick the smallest viable audience for whom GoudronBlanc would become the best option.

Quickly, I found that there was a group of people–our minimum viable audience–who shared a worldview. They wanted to be able to show up at work wearing elegant T-shirts.

Besides, they also cared about knowing how these T-shirts were made.

(More here about using worldviews to build the story of your brand.)

We were onto something!

We created the best option for our target audience:

Elegant T-shirts made in Europe using organic cotton.

The smaller your viable audience is, the easier it will be for you to be the best at serving them.

How minimum should your minimum viable audience be?

Kevin Kelly argues that an audience of 1,000 True Fans is enough for an independent creative to make a decent living. If each of them spends $100 per year, it’s a total of $100,000 per year.

“One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.”

Kelly refers to solopreneurs. But his idea works for businesses too.

The principle here is to force your focus on a defined number of customers that sounds feasible.

What about the exact number?

It could be 1,000 or 5,000.

The exact number doesn’t matter. What matters is writing down a number that you feel comfortable with.

In Kelly’s words:

There is something important and liberating in seeking a finite attainable number of passionate fans rather than hoping for a rare best-selling career backed by millions of folks who have just heard about you.

The right “minimum” depends on what’s “viable” for you.

Many factors matter. These include price, COGS, potential share of customer, and the size of your business.

Identifying your audience with content

What about starting with an existing… audience?

An increasing number of businesses have used inventive ways to lower market risks. Instead of starting with a product, they start with content.

Case study: Using content to build a minimum viable audience

In 2004, Rand Fishkin started SEOMoz (now called Moz), a blog sharing tips about search engine optimization.

Moz built an audience before launching. The founding team quickly grew a following that trusted them. Their readers were interested in acquiring customers through SEO. The team understood that and started offering SEO consulting services.

By interacting with their minimum viable audience, the Moz team figured out that consulting wasn’t enough. There was an opportunity to build some SEO tools that would help their customers do better SEO. Today, Moz is a successful SaaS business with over $30 millions in revenue.

All that just started as a blog about SEO back in 2004.

Here’s how Rand Fishkin feels with hindsight:

“This is a strategy I’d replicate again, far more intentionally, with any future venture.

(1) The greatest advantage initially seems like it’s the low cost of marketing you’ve generated by having a steady stream of people who already care about the problem you’re trying to solve visiting your site, knowing you, liking you, and trusting you.

(2) But, even more valuable is the deep experience you gain from spending so much time trying to provide value to and earn attention and amplification from the crowd you eventually want to serve.”

Any business can use content to spot emerging trends among a target audience.

It’s also great to learn about your market.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, who theorised one-to-one marketing summarise it well in Managing Customer Relationships:

“The enterprise learns more about its own strengths and weaknesses from each interaction and from the customer’s feedback, and is therefore able to market, communicate, and handle some aspects of its own tactics or strategy more efficiently and effectively than was possible prior to the relationship.”

Creating your own media can be an effective way to interact with your audience and learn from their feedback.

And you’ll be better prepared for the launch of new products.

The benefits of gathering your smallest viable audience

Having access to an audience of passionate people who love your content is a real asset.

This was a huge benefit for me when I launched The Value Mix.

Like Rand Fishkin, I had already gathered a group of “true fans”. They’d been following this blog and my newsletter, Progress, for years.

So when I launched The Value Mix?

They trusted me. They knew it would be a good book (for them).

 

User experience design has become one of the most important disciplines in innovation.

It’s key to creating great products!

And there a few frameworks that can help a lot for that.

In this post, you’re going to learn how you can use five of these UX frameworks to design better user experience.

In fact:

These are the frameworks that UX designers from companies like Facebook and Pinterest use to increase user engagement.

1. B.J. Fogg’s Behavior Model: The UX Equation of B = MAP

Objective:

The Fogg Behavior Model helps you take into account behaviour change when you create the UX of a product or service.

What it is:

This framework explains the cause of a specific behaviour with a simple model:

Behaviour = Motivation * Ability * Prompt (summarised as B = MAP).

In B.J. Fogg’s words:

“The [framework] shows that three elements must converge at the same moment for a behavior to occur: Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.”

This means:

For a specific behaviour to occur, a person needs sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, and an effective prompt.

• Prompt = Do this now.
• Ability = You can do it now.
• Motivation = You want to do it now.

Make the three elements converge at the same time and a specific behaviour will occur.

Of course, the model is a simplistic view of the reality. Human behaviour is far more complex. Many variables like culture and society also shape our behaviours.

But, in the context of designing user experience for behaviour change, having a simplified framework helps a lot.

The UX Nugget

As we see on the graph, action (behaviour) is a function of both ability and motivation.

So if your UX is crap, you need to target an audience of highly engaged users. (This is what’s often called “early adopters”, i.e. people who really need what you’re helping them to achieve).

On the other hand, if you are targeting people who aren’t really engaged, you need to make it dead easy for them to take a specific action.

For example, users who have to deal with their expenses are really unengaged. The process, therefore, needs to be super easy, if not automated.

Put it into practice:

Here are three useful questions to help you as you design or review the user experience of a proposition:

Use these questions to review each screen or interaction you created in your product.

2. Nir Eyal’s Hooked Model: Create Habit-forming UX

Nir Eyal’s framework is an adaptation of the B = MAP equation.

Objective:

The Hooked model helps build what Nir Eyal calls “habit-forming products”.

These products are designed to drive user engagement.

How?

They create a user experience which encourage users to return and use those products over and over again.

What it is:

The idea behind the framework is that making your users go through the right steps can get to influence their behaviour.

If you succeed to make them repeat that loop, they’ll start forming habits—the habit of returning and using your product.

How it works:

The loop based on the Hooked model consists of four components:

(1) Triggers:

External  Triggers are the prompts that get users to your product.

Internal  Triggers are the set of emotions and jobs to be done that your product addresses to encourage them to use your product.

Both types of triggers should reinforce each other. The External Triggers are designed to leverage existing Internal Triggers.

(2) Action:

To encourage your users to take Action (i.e. a specific behaviour), you must reduce the level of friction. It means making it as easy as possible to perform this action.

This is the core of the B = MAP equation I talked about earlier.

(3) Variable Rewards :

Variable Rewards are about creating anticipations.

This is at the core of building habits.

Let’s break down the two components:

1. You must find ways to include rewards that are fulfilling, yet leave the user wanting more.
2. The best is when you make them variable, there’s an element of “nearly-predictable” surprise.

The combination of both generates a high level of anticipation from your users.

An example?

The Instagram News Feed.

The Feed algorithm triggers user engagement over and over again. Every time you refresh the feed, it shows you recent and engaging updates from your friends (variable rewards).

And what’s more likely to make you react than photos of people you know?

Variable Rewards increase the level of dopamine. Users end up being more likely to get excited about performing certain actions, over and over again.

(4) Investment:

Investments are about helping your users turn your product into an asset (i.e. something that gains value as you input more effort and data into it).

Two cognitive phenomenons happen here:

1. It’s a lock-in tactic. Investments increase the switching cost and make it more likely for your users to return.
2. There’s a sense of escalation of commitment. The negative impact of switching to another product (loss of the investments of time, effort, and data) reinforces the value of the current behaviour.

You can read more about this framework in Nir Eyal’s book: Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.

3. The 6 Levels of User Experience

Objective:

The 6 Levels of User Experience helps your prioritise your workflow.

(Inspired from the Elements of User Experience.)

What it is:

There’s an optimal order to how you organise what you do to design the user experience of a proposition.

Don’t put the cart before the horse. :O

Indeed, each level of UX is informed by the level above.

If you start working on one level before you’ve figured out the one above, it won’t make sense.

This is what Intercom calls the “dribbblisation of design”:

“Things that look great but don’t work well.”

Indeed, you cannot create a useful and easy-to-use interface if you work on the visual design before you’ve selected what information the user will need to see on it.

How it works:

You must make sure that you are clear on the most abstract level before you ask yourself:

“How do we implement this?”

The use case is clear?

So.. “how do we implement this?”

You create the user journey.

“How do we implement this?”

You need to define what information is needed at this level.

And so on, and so on…

I dive in this topic in more depth in my new book, The Value Mix.

You’ll find more examples and tools that will help you design a better UX for your audience.

4. Prioritising Your UX Design with the Proficiency Scale

Objective:

The Proficiency Scale is a framework that helps you prioritise the information and actions you show to your users based on their level of proficiency.

What it is:

The Proficiency Scale is inspired by Jason Fried’s distinction among three levels of priority:

“Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful.”

To create a great UX, you need to prioritise what you show to your users, where you display the actions and informations.

How it works:

I designed the Proficiency Scale to illustrate that:

The level of proficiency of a user correlates with what needs to be obvious, easy, or only possible.

Let’s dig in:

If your user just started with your product, you should only show them what needs to be obvious.

As your user gains knowledge, he’ll be able to access what’s easy to do.

The last bucket, what’s possible, is for people who have become experts. These possible actions are more difficult to find, “hidden” in menus and shortcuts.

An example of the Proficiency Scale in software

For example, WordPress’s jobs go like this:

Get an idea => Draft a post => Edit => Publish.

The minimal level of proficiency should allow new users to accomplish at least all of these steps.

As educating new users (called “n00bs” here) is costly, WordPress has to make it feel intuitive. They emphasised and made obvious all the actions that you need to get the job of publishing an article done.

In this case, what WordPress needed to make obvious are the following actions: creating a draft, editing the draft, saving the draft, and publishing.

An example of the Proficiency Scale in hardware

Universal remotes are confusing.

The proof:

As you can see on the right, all the buttons that only an expert would use are made obvious.

On the right, the Duct tape highlights what should be obvious. The rest should just be easy or possible.

You immediately realise that: when everything is obvious, nothing is obvious. (And the UX gets confusing.)

So what should you do?

Make obvious only the core of what’s necessary to achieve a specific user goal.

5. The Familiarity Test

Objective:

The Familiarity Test is a UX design principle that helps you create a UX that your users will adopt intuitively by reducing the learning curve for your users.

What it is:

Familiarity is the degree to which users recognise elements of the user experience (including the user interface).

“Don’t try to change user behavior dramatically. If you are expecting people to dramatically change the way they do things, it’s not going to happen. Try to make it such that it’s a small change, yet an important one.”

— Sabeer Bhatia, Founder of Hotmail

A familiar UX allows your users to view their interaction with your product or service as natural and intuitive.

How it works:

Familiarity is based on the similarity with the propositions your users have interacted with in the past.

It works because using standardised interfaces reduces the learning curve. Your users can interact with your product without really thinking about how it works. That’s the power of being intuitive.

But it can limit what they can achieve.

Therefore, you need to balance familiarity with user benefits:

How much extra benefit do they get from the unfamiliar elements in your user experience?

An example of the Familiarity Test in hardware:

It’s been proven that the DVORAK keyboard yield a 30% speed improvement compared to a traditional QWERTY one.

But for the majority of users, DVORAK is not familiar enough to justify the extra benefit.

Unfortunately, the Marketing Mix has become has-been.

Marketing means more today…

As you know, the 4 Ps aimed to help define:

1. what a company offers — product and price;
2. and how it does this — place and promotion.

But in 2019, marketing needs a better definition.

In this article, you’ll learn a better alternative that will help you organise your marketing strategy.

The 4 Ms of Today’s Marketing Mix

This new marketing mix fits in 4 Ms.

It focuses on:

1. who your customers are and what you are offering to them – market and merchandise;
2. and how you entice them to buy from you – message and media.

Marketing is the bridge between the organisation and its customers–a relationship that leads to providing a business with cash flow.

Defining what marketing stands for in 2019 isn’t an abstract issue.

The way a company defines marketing shapes how it organises its marketing. This is crucial if you want to build a strong brand and a successful marketing strategy.

Following the success of this article, I published The Value Mix. This new book helps you create successful propositions with a practical alternative to the marketing mix.

Get the book here.

So let’s define today’s marketing mix using the 4 Ms of the marketing mix (I added one as a bonus).

Digging into the 4 Ms of Today’s Marketing Mix

Two major things have changed since the inception of the 4 Ps:

• First, the scope of marketing is much broader. It doesn’t only encompass products but also ideas, movements, experiences…
• Second, marketing strategy has switched from a linear approach to an experimental, iterative approach. Real data is now available to support marketing decisions and refine them over time.

Here’s how you can take these shifts into account.

1. Market

The first step of developing a successful business strategy is to understand who your customers are.

Defining and understanding the market first helps you avoid the pitfalls of marketing myopia, a term coined in 1960 by Theodore Levitt, the then editor of Harvard Business Review. Businesses that focus on selling products rather than serving their customers limit the scope of their market.

Customer-oriented businesses work on helping customers achieve what they want to do and don’t limit the market to a certain category of products.

Gaining insight into your market means identifying who your customers are and empathising with what they want to achieve. It requires you to understand their problems.

You can’t limit yourself to segmenting the market based on demographics. There is, of course, some correlation in the way 30-to-45-year-old men tend to live their lives. But it’s not enough. Demographics is a shortcut to segmenting the market but it gives little insight.

There isn’t such a thing as “millennials”

GoPro doesn’t focus on selling cameras to people in their twenties and thirties–the so-called “millennials”. Its focus is to help people record the cool things they do, including extreme sports. It’s easier for GoPro to sell its HERO5 camera to passionate surfers and skiers than for it to attempt to identify who the “millennials” really are.

Three major benefits of using your market as a starting point for your marketing strategy are as follows:

(1) The size of the market is not limited to a product category;
(2) It reduces the risk of missing what your market really wants and needs;
(3) It makes it easier to understand how to sell your merchandise and build relationships with your market.

Here’s a practical way of approaching this: Some smart companies narrow down the scope of their market. They target what they call a Minimum Viable Audience. The objective is to make sure they offer something meaningful for their market!

2. Merchandise

Marketing goes beyond the concept of products.

As marketers, we’ve changed our thinking from the physical object that is being sold to the overall experience that we offer to our customers.

This is why marketers often refer to “product and services” but marketing also applies to ideas, movements, jobs, cities, countries, and even individuals.

Tailoring the right value proposition for your merchandise requires you to understand the market very well. You gain insight thanks to business experimentation–an iterative process of running insightful market research and observing how your market reacts to different versions of your merchandise.

Building it for them

Focusing on a well-defined market helped me write The Value Mix.

I realised that many product managers and entrepreneurs I knew were struggling to bring market research all together with their product strategy. They needed a framework to help them understand what their market wants and build the right product for them.

This led me to write a book that helps them do that. But that wasn’t it. To make sure this was the right book for them, I constantly iterated.

I published a first draft that I sent to a few friends. Their feedback helped me tailor a better version that I published on Leanpub.

It felt like writing software.

The platform has allowed me to release several versions of The Value Mix. Based on the comments I received, I could adapt the book to make sure it’s all relevant for my readers.

Experimenting with your product strategy

Tesla has mastered the iterative process of constantly testing and improving its merchandise. Every now and then, the electric carmaker updates its software to add new features to the car. It has also recently leveraged the power of crowdfunding, another way to engage its market and experiment with coming merchandises. Hundreds of thousands of Tesla Model 3 were pre-ordered, a great way for Tesla to evaluate the demand for its new car before producing any.

The merchandise is what marketers tailor and offer to create a set of experiences for their customers.

3. Message

Your message is what you tell your market so they can tell themselves a consistent story about your merchandise.

(More here about how to find the seeds for building a great story for your brand.)

There’s a natural misalignment between the story you tell and the one people tell themselves. They only get a portion of your message. Nobody has enough time and energy to know the whole story, so they make up things with the portion they know. As a result, your message needs to be very simple and consistent across all media.

Think about it.

How much do you really know about, for example, Amazon, Apple, or Samsung? Probably just enough to tell yourself a story that makes sense and convinces you to buy from them.

So your marketing strategy needs a simple and memorable message.

4. Media (and 5. MarTech)

Many companies fall into the trap of wanting to be everywhere. But this dilutes the ability to reach the market effectively.

Choosing the right media depends on four elements: who is in your market, what is your merchandise, what message you are sharing, and what do your competitors already do?

Today’s analytics tools–the so-called Marketing Tech (or MarTech) tools–are essential to figuring out the best way to share your message. Thanks to an experimental approach, your team can find out how to improve your marketing campaigns over time.

The key is to pick the right marketing channel

Well managed, Google Analytics can tell you exactly how a specific digital marketing campaign drives your sales. You can then experiment to figure out how profitable each channel is. This is how I know for sure that SEO is a more profitable channel than PR for GoudronBlanc.

Having this level of precision helps to make better-informed marketing decisions.

For that, you need the right marketing technology

MarTech tools are very useful in the process of gaining insight into the market. But they are also great in terms of competitive intelligence.

For example, a tool like SERanking—one of my favourite SEO tools—allows you to get insights into your competitors’ strategies in display advertising as well as organic (SEO) and paid search (SEM). You can find out the keywords people have used the most to land on your competitors’ website. It’s a handy way to inform your digital marketing strategy and leverage the best media.

Implementing the 4 Ms in Your Organisation

A good framework offers guidance.

The four Ms are useful to make sure that you checked all the aspects of what you’re selling and how you’re selling it.

The brands that win succeed to get consistency across the four Ms. This is a matter of how you organise your teams and how you allocate roles to cover all these questions.

Want more practical advice about creating successful products?

Get the Value Mix. You’ll love this book because it helps you create products that make a real difference.

—

Appendix:

What marketing means in 2019 (a recap)

As marketing guru Tim Ambler explained:

“[The essence of marketing is] the sourcing and harvesting of cash flow.”

This definition is a starting point to how marketing has to be seen today.

Marketing is the bridge between the organisation and its customers–a relationship that leads to providing a business with cash flow.

Notes:

My inspiration for this article comes from Al Ries, the great mind who popularised the concept of positioning. He recently challenged the four P’s, suggesting an alternative framework, the 4 M’s: merchandise, market, media, and message.

This is an interesting idea.

It illustrates how marketing today has a much broader scope than it did in the dark days before digital. But Ries’ framework is missing the modern approach to marketing that tech companies have developed over the last 15 years.

There’s something that the most successful brands do well:

They leverage existing beliefs to tell stories.

That’s because a person’s way of viewing the world is a major indicator of the decisions they make and the types of stories that resonate with them.

(Some call these beliefs “mindset”. In Positioning, Al Ries used the term “customers’ minds”. In All Marketers Are Liars, Seth Godin used the term “worldview” that I like the most, as the word is self-explanatory.)

As a marketer or innovator, using worldviews to look at your market helps you understand what stories resonate with your target customers, what products and services they consider buying, and why.

(This article has been inspired by my experience growing GoudronBlanc, helping entrepreneurs build businesses, and the great work of Seth Godin and Al Ries).

Let me first dig into what worldviews are.

Then, I’ll explain how you can use worldviews to create products and services that people want, figure out the right positioning strategy, and tell stories that spread.

Of course, these reflections on storytelling and marketing include real-world examples.

What worldviews mean in innovation and marketing

Worldviews are the beliefs, values, and opinions your customers hold about the world.

Marketers use worldviews as an effective way to segment a market and identify opportunities for new products and services.

In many cases, worldviews are a better alternative to demographics. That’s because what people believe to be true can be a more accurate predictor of future behaviours compared to age, gender, or socioeconomic attributes.

To explain how it works, here’s an example from the fashion industry.

Using worldviews to shape the storytelling of a brand

Since 2000, many factors were accelerating the progress of fast fashion in Europe, e.g. the 2008 crisis, the rise of e-commerce, the growth of Zara and Uniqlo, etc.).

A huge part of the market had a specific worldview: people valued buying cheap clothes, often.

In 2011, I started working on creating a fashion brand, GoudronBlanc. Looking at the market, I realised that the “fast fashion” worldview was driving the prices down. It was an arms race among big retailers, i.e. not a good space for a new business.

By doing some insight gathering and using worldviews as a way to segment the market, I found that there was an emerging worldview. And it was great news as people sharing this worldview seemed to be underserved.

This was the “buy less, buy better” worldview.

It appeared that more and more men wanted to buy better quality clothes. They valued quality over quantity and were willing to pay more for having clothes that fit better and last longer.

Then, with more nuances, I spotted that within this worldview, there was a worldview of men who thought it was cool to wear T-shirts at the office.

I was getting close to something interesting to tell a story that would resonate.

The insight was the inspiration that led to the creation of GoudronBlanc. It helped me tell the right story to my target customers. In 2012, we launched with a range of high quality T-shirts that men love wearing at the office.

The story we tell, the product, and the customer experience are all tailored in a way that fits the worldview we want to target.

Looking at demographics to segment the market would never have got me there. When you analyse sales now, there is very little correlation between any demographic variables and who buys GoudronBlanc T-shirts. But what most of them share is the same worldview.

It should be clearer now:

Worldviews can help you spot opportunities, create the right product/service, and tell a story that will resonate with the people you want to serve. It is the strong foundation of a good positioning strategy.

And for that, you need to target resonating worldviews.

What are resonating worldviews?

Worldviews can be a powerful storytelling tool for businesses. To be useful, worldviews need to help you achieve one thing:

They should encourage your ideas and stories to spread at an affordable cost.

“Marketing succeeds when enough people with similar worldviews come together in a way that allows marketers to reach them cost-effectively.”

– Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars

A resonating worldview is a belief, value, or opinion that:

• already exists (it’s expensive and very risky to create worldviews from scratch);
• enough people share (big enough target segment in the market);
• shared by people who talk to each other (a tribe);
• is growing (it spreads among the population).

1. An existing worldview

The smartest business people avoid falling fall into the trap of trying to change people’s worldviews.

“People don’t want to change their worldview. They like it, they embrace it, and they want it to be reinforced.”

– Seth Godin, All Marketers Are Liars

Successful businesses rarely create new trends.

Instead, they surf on the wave and encourage the worldview to grow.

You can observe a similar process again and again. The founders get some insight that uncovers an emerging worldview. Then, they create something and tell a story that are likely to fit this particular worldview. They experiment their way into fitting this worldview (i.e. getting to product/market fit). And when they feel there’s enough traction, they start growing the worldview faster.

“There’s a common idea that in some way fashion designers get together in a room and decide what the fashion will be next year. That’s a pretty fundamental misunderstanding. Rather, they propose what might fit the zeitgeist.

Sometimes that’s incremental and sometimes it’s a radical break – sometimes the pendulum needs to swing from one extreme to another. Sometimes they get it wrong, but when they get it right it captures an age.”

– Ben Evans, Fashion, Maslow, and Facebook’s control of social

Here’s a common mistake:

We often think that a business created a totally new worldview from scratch. Most of the time, we missed the fact that they started with a small, emerging worldview small and progressively grew this worldview.

It is much easier to build a product or service based on what some people already believe and value.

2. Enough people…

This is common sense: if you want to grow a business, you need a big enough market.

The question “what is big enough?” depends on your ambitions, your business model, what your investors are expecting…

3. …but small enough: a tribe

The key part here is small enough.

It is appealing to please everyone. But a startup needs to focus on a tight community of early adopters, i.e. a tribe.

In marketing, a tribe is group of people who are linked by shared beliefs, a worldview. These are people who do yoga, cycle to work, do indoor climbing, follow a paleo diet… and will tell you everything about how they embrace their worldviews.

They frequently talk to each other (online or offline) and share stories and ideas about their lifestyles and worldviews.

This is particularly powerful!

A tribe will make it so much easier to spread the stories of your product or service.

4. A growing worldview

Another obvious one.

Useful worldviews are the ones that can spread within the market. And this is where your company can help.

Yoga was already a thing when Lululemon started in 1998. But not as much as it is now.

They jumped on this emerging worldview and accelerated its growth. They were hosting free yoga classes, helped people find studios where they live, sponsored trainers… This led Lululemon to sell for $1.79 billion of yoga-specific clothes and accessories in 2015.

It is important to spot an existing worldview with good potential for growth, though it’s tricky to be able to assess how big it can become.

The difficulty is that there’s limited data on emerging worldviews. Spotting them requires to identify patterns and nuances in your insight. It can be very tricky.

5. One last thing, actually…

Useful worldviews almost always exclude part of the market.

This is the by-product of targeting a tribe.

Different segments of customers have different worldviews. And, most of the time, they are polarising.

Think about McDonald’s:

• For some people, McDonald’s means Happy Meal, Big Mac, and nice moments with friends or family;
• For others, McDonald’s means saturated fat, too much carbs, and junk food.

Of course, this is a simplified view of the market. But here’s the question:

If you were running McDonald’s, would you try to please both worldviews?

How worldviews fit with storytelling

Here’s what my poorly-drawn schema explains.

Get good insight

Gathering insight helps you spot the worldviews that sit in your market. Some are obvious. But most emerging worldviews come from nuances spotted in qualitative and quantitative data.

A worldview becomes the platform on which you build your positioning strategy.

Tell the right story

And you communicate your positioning strategy by telling the stories that fit the worldview you want to target.

This is through your stories and customer experience that you position your value proposition in the minds of your customers.

GoPro used stories to position its camera

I mentioned GoPro in this reflection about the new 4 Ps of marketing.

That’s because GoPro is a great example of a brand that was positioned using stories that resonated with a growing worldview.

GoPro doesn’t target 20-to-30-year-old men. Age isn’t a meaningful way of segmenting their market. Instead, the brand focuses on a worldview that perceives extreme sports, as a means to personal achievement.

And GoPro addresses this worldview using stories.

As a result, men of all age resonate with the way GoPro frames its stories. When they watch a GoPro video on YouTube, they feel like the video was made for them.

But it goes beyond. Since extreme sport practitioners are a tribe, they are all connected online (forums, YouTube…) and in real life. So when they practice their favourite sports together, it makes it very easy for the “GoPro story” to spread.

The example I just described isn’t a magic formula. It’s an example that aims at illustrating what I’ve explained. And I hope that it will also inspire your work.

So what’s the next step for you?

It can be difficult to leverage worldviews to create the right value proposition, and define your storytelling and marketing strategy.

So here’s what you can start doing:

While you are gathering insight, you can try to spot the worldviews that sit in your market. There are useful questions you can ask yourself:

• What do our potential customers strongly believe to be true?
• What do they value? What seems to be irrational?
• How do people perceive the world today?
• Which are the beliefs that contrast with the rest of the market?
• Have we heard or seen something surprising or unusual?

Answering these questions should lead you to a better understanding of your market. It will make it easier to create a product that really fits what people want and tell stories that will resonate with them.

And don’t forget

Worlview is a tool.

Spotting emerging worldviews isn’t a necessary phase of the innovation process. But it can be a very useful one.

Not every success story was built on a worldview, though many have been.

There many cases in which successful businesses took the following path:

1. They identify a tribe who shares an existing worldview.
2. They create a product or service and tell a story that is likely fit this worldview.
3. They iterate until it really fits the worldview.
4. Then, once they reached product/market fit, they focus on growing this worldview.

So what is the worldview that you are targeting? What story are you telling your target customers?