Start this, stop that
Marketing strategies for covid, plus the inside story of the semi-famous Spotify model
Hi 👋
I finished the startup memoir Uncanny Valley this weekend. It is one of my favorite books of the year. I loved seeing the startup world through someone else’s eyes, although I found myself disagreeing with much of the author’s opinions. I think that’s why I liked the book so much: it helped me understand my relationship with tech. Here are my highlights. Have you read anything good lately? I’d love to know about it.
Hope you have a good week ahead,
Kevan
Image by Rafael Serra
A Keep / Start / Stop list of covid marketing strategies
by Caryn Marooney, Coatue Management
Summary:
Today, I got an email from a company that once sold me a pair of jeans.
They wanted to talk about Covid-19.
😬
I imagine you might’ve seen emails like those over the past weeks. Well, as a respite, there are many fresh ideas for marketing strategies in this article, all organized into buckets of things to stop doing, to start doing, and to do even more of. For example:
STOP using outdated marketing automation
START retention marketing
START conducting micro-experiments
START creative pricing structures
KEEP your position of teaching, not selling
KEEP tracking metrics
Spotify doesn’t use the Spotify squad model
by Jeremiah Lee
Summary:
Spotify’s squads & tribes & guilds model (above) contains a lot of really great ideas — even if they never really worked for Spotify. We’ve used variations of this model at Buffer. The best parts of the model — putting together teams of people with different skillsets — have been quite useful for us. I guess, like with any organization framework, mileage may vary.
A decision tree for how to pivot your marketing for covid
by Walker Sands
Summary:
This covid resource adapts to your particular business situation. If you’ve lost revenue, lost a lot revenue, or gained revenue, the advice on the page changes to show you how to tackle things like messaging, budgets, channel allocation, and more.
End 💜
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