Many will recall the masterful way Steve Jobs fired up the public’s anticipation for Apple products by teasing about upcoming product launches. Elon Musk of Tesla fame plays a similar game using his Twitter feed to great advantage.
Of course what comes over as personal, genuine and authentic is often choreographed and planned with great care.
Accepted wisdom is that few companies have the cult following necessary to generate public interest by leaking out product information. Obviously Tesla and Apple do have the cult following. However, just like the Hollywood movie industry they have to be cautious. It’s a fine line between giving away too much information before the product is out and just enough information. Show too much in the blockbuster trailer and people will feel like they have already seen the movie. Show too little and they won’t form an emotional connection with enough depth to pull them to the cinema.
While it may not be possible to build a cult following on the scale of Jobs and Musk it is still possible to use the tease and pre-announcement to build anticipation and create significant commercial advantage.
From inception electric motorcycle company Brammo Inc focused on building a social media presence using Twitter and Facebook. Brammo actively encouraged fans to promote the company via social media and each year gave away an electric motorcycle to the fan who was determined to be the “Brammo Evangelist” of the year.
In July 2010 Brammo pre announced their revolutionary Empulse electric motorcycle using a 90 second movie style trailer. with over a million Youtube views this one video generated a huge customer pre-order backlog for thousands of Empulse motorcycles and simultaneously captured the attention of both investors and the media. Indeed Brammo went on to raise over $90 million and as you might expect the pre-announcement effectively stalled sales at Brammo’s nearest competitor. The first Empulse was delivered 18 months later in December 2012.
If you have a consumer product that can genuinely be described as “game changing” then with our help this approach might be right for you.
First published by Adrian G Stewart at OOKII.Company
Adrian G Stewart
