Patrick Vlaskovits, who gave new meaning to the phrase “the medium is the message” in a presentation at the Internet Summit on Thursday, wants your forgiveness.
Vlaskovits introduced the phrase “growth hacking” to the world, which he notes became one of the most overused and clichéd buzzwords in the business world. New York Times best selling author of “The Lean Entrepreneur” in 2010 and of “Hustle, the Power to Change Your Life with Money, Meaning, and Momentum,” in 2013, he is CEO and cofounder of Superpowered.
In his Internet Summit session, Vlaskovits said entrepreneurs should see innovation as an actual impediment to overcome rather than an advantage. While he noted that many people at a conference such as the Internet Summit might value innovation, people generally avoid anything new.
“What’s harder than innovation is selling innovation,” he said. “Most people run away from anything new. Build it and they will not come.”
The whole idea that if you build a better mousetrap as the saying goes, that people will beat a path to your door is false, he added.
He used examples such as plastic wrap, penicillin and Tupperware, both largely rejected by the public until someone found a new distribution channel that would overcome fear of the new.
Tupperware, for instance, was on the shelves at Macys but no one was buying it, he said. Introduced in 1945 when plastic still had a reputation for being sticky, smelly and unreliable, an ad campaign and other promotions failed to win public acceptance.
She found a new medium
Then, a woman named Mary Wise told the company she was selling lots of product by doing home demonstrations of the way Tupperware worked. That led to a new distribution channel that overcame consumer concerns and Tupperware parties became a money-making opportunity for many a housewife.
“What do successful innovators do,” Vlaskovits asked. “She found a new medium.”
They realize, he said, that “The way your customer finds out about your product is not separate from the content of your product. To get past the innovation impediment, you have to evolve your product with the message and the medium. Just putting something on the market is not a strategy.”
Just as Mary Wise found a new way to sell Tupperware via home parties, “You have to find a new medium for new messages. That’s the essence of growth marketing. You have to look at this through a new lens.”
He showed a slide picturing his young son eating a large cone of flower-shaped ice cream. “What do you do when you see something like that? You take out your phone, take a picture and share it,” he said.
For growth hacking, he said, “You have to understand how things go from a medium to a channel.”
He also said “the era of cheap startups, cheap talent, and cheap growth is coming to an end.”
So, with distribution of a product becoming more expensive, “Hacking growth is more important than ever. Make it part of your strategy.”
Some areas for doing that, he suggested, include virtual reality and augmented reality, Bitcoin, artificial intelligence, and 3D printing, among others.
