This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube episode (Marketing School, Ep. #851) published on 2018-11-29 featuring hosts Eric Siu and Neil Patel. The short, conversational episode argues that the majority of customers come from product quality and word-of-mouth rather than marketing; they use examples like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, iPad vs. Surface, and discuss being "remarkable." It ends with a call-to-action to help the podcast reach 1 million listens (marketingschool.io/stats) to unlock a free live event.
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Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.
And I'm Neil Patel.
And today we're going to talk about, well, the majority of your customers won't come from marketing. They'll come from this instead.
So you're probably wondering, what is the this? Everyone thinks that marketing is how you grow your company. And yes, marketing is powerful. We have a podcast on marketing, but we're telling you there's something more powerful than marketing. It's creating a good product or service. When you create a good product or service, I kid you not, you'll find that, this sounds silly, majority of your customers will come from word of mouth. The more word of mouth marketing or the more better you create a product or a service like Amazon, you'll just naturally get customers. You don't see Apple or Google spending billions and billions of dollars on TV ads, yet they're bigger than GEICO. And GEICO spends probably the majority of the money in the US on TV ads. I think they have beat almost every single company out there. But by creating amazing product or service, you'll just naturally get more customers. And if you're relying on marketing for your source of customers and nothing else is working, that means you need to relook at your product and service.
Yeah, I think of this podcast kind of like a product, right? And, you know, it's funny because I hear a lot of people saying, oh my God, it's changed so much. I've told so many people about it. And that in itself is word of mouth. It starts to spread because our quote unquote product, Marketing School, is remarkable because it's every single day and it's a little different and it's worth talking about, right? That's how you get word of mouth because word of mouth, that's people talking about it. Remarkable means people are talking about it, right? So, how do you do that? How do you create a remarkable experience? So, let's think about another example. Tesla, right? Why do people talk about Tesla so much? Because it's like driving— you're like sitting in a computer. It's not like you're in a car, right? Yes, you are in a car, but it operates like an app, right? It's getting upgraded all the time. It's worth talking about. It drives a lot faster. That's remarkable. You're able to create these remarkable experiences. Because you have a great product. So a lot of people start to take out these remarkable moments and talk about them.
If you look at Tesla, there's so many people that preorder their cars. They don't do TV ads or anything like this. Yes, it's just they have these, you know, what is it called? Shops that people are seeing. Yes, other people are buying Teslas and you're seeing it. But the reason they've done well and why people are buying it, people are like, oh my God, this is a really cool, amazing car. And Elon doesn't focus, and the team doesn't focus on getting the messaging out. They focus on first building the best product that they can.
Yeah. If you think about too, okay, let's use another example. I'm going to give you one more example. Okay. Why is it in the tablet space, you got the iPad and then you got the Surface and then you got, I guess the Surface is technically a tablet. And then you got like the, I think the Pixel has like a tablet too now, but everyone's still trying to catch the iPad. The iPad just announced recently, or Apple just announced recently that there's a new Pro coming out and it's like, Levels ahead. They're widening the gap between the other competitors. And that, you know, all the new bells and whistles that they have, that's remarkable. That's why people talk about Apple products so much.
And check this out. Have you seen the Surface TV commercials? The Salmon Sisters or the guy who builds robots and he uses the Microsoft Surface?
Forgot about it.
Okay, but there's tons of Microsoft Surface commercials. There's tons of tablet commercials out there. Have you seen an iPad commercial?
Barely.
Exactly. Apple doesn't have to spend as much on marketing for their tablets because they work better. People like the product, they're nicer, and because of that, they naturally just go to it. Like, I watched a Microsoft Surface commercial for one of their tablets, and they're talking about the Salmon Sisters and how they have this online business and they're in fishing or something like that. And I Googled the Salmon Sisters to see what kind of business this is because they were talking about how they do well. And I'm like, all right, this looks interesting. And same with the guy who sells robots. And when I did it, I didn't look to go buy the Surface. I did it to go see what are these businesses and how are they working? I'm like, oh, it's just curiosity. So they were featured on the Surface commercial, but me as a potential end customer, I didn't even research the Surface. Instead, I researched the companies that they're talking about on their TV commercial.
That's interesting actually. I mean, if you look at any of the Apple types of ads, when there are Apple ads, let's say the iPhone for example, it just, it's just, The product.
It's the product. It's just like, we take better pictures. Look at this picture.
Yeah.
Or they have celebrities. Apple loves celebrities. Like, they'll be like, check out our headphones. Drake is wearing them, or LeBron James is wearing them, or Cristiano Ronaldo is wearing them.
Yep. 100%. So look, word of mouth, like create a great experience for people. Seth Godin talks about in one of his books, well, he just talks about being remarkable, right? So even if you're like looking for a job, like, How do you be remarkable? How do you stand out? How do you make it where people want to talk about you? How do you make it where you increase your value? Same thing with a great product too. If you have a great product, you're able to charge more money. More people talk about you, you spend less on marketing, which means you can invest those dollars back into the product to create an even better experience for your next launch. So we don't want to beat a dead horse here. Neil, do you have anything else to add? Nope.
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