I’ve been going through the process of thinking about how to market and sell myself and my work.
That has required a lot of time to do the difficult work of thinking.
As I’m working through how to offer up more ideas to generate more ideas with a hat tip to Louis Grenier from Everybody Hates Marketing for sharing how he came up with his daily cadence on his email, I wanted to take a moment to share some stuff I’ve been reading and that has caught my interest as an amuse-bouche.
Tesla will continue discounting:
I’ve written a lot about discounting and discounts over the years.
Elon Musk has said a lot about his distrust in advertising.
We’ve hit a point of a standoff, but Tesla’s recent reports showed that their sales incentives have cut their profits by somewhere in the area of 40% from 29.1% margins down to 18.2%.
While Elon Musk is accurate when he says you can’t control the macroeconomics, you can definitely control your own business and not be like a flag in the wind at the mercy of every hiccup or bad news day.
What Telsa’s latest troubles seem to indicate is a failure to put strategy before tactics. With the will they or won’t they of Elon Musk’s proclamation that Tesla might start advertising.
The two big things that make me continue to pay attention to this story:
- The way that the “doom loop of discounts” just gets into a company and can’t be stopped. This piece will show you a nice illustration of what we are seeing in action. (Seriously, an actual drawing.)
- The need for Tesla to break the bonds between their brand and the brand of Elon Musk. Gone are the days when kids and the general public called Elon Musk a business genius. Instead, we still have his fanboys saying everything is 4-D chess, but most of his actions seem like the knee-jerk reactions of someone in over his head and scrambling to stay afloat.
BTW, you’ll be able to catch a free session on pricing by me in August. Where we definitely talk about discounts.