Elon Musk's $O Marketing Strategy

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For today’s lineup, we have a guessing game even your grandma can solve:

1. This man is often the wealthiest person on the planet.

2. His tweets have been rumoured to control markets.

3. He's the closest living example of Tony Stark.

Introducing a PBB deep dive on Mr. Elonnnnnnnn Musk.

The Stanford University-dropout, and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has become quite the household name. He’s known for his:

• resilience
• will to make things happen.
• And his quotable tweets that stir the pot

He’s taller than you think (6”2). And the last/only time I saw him in person at the TED Conference he was sporting a white dress shirt, black shiny shoes and drinking a normal glass of room temperature water:

You see, Elon sticks out. In a world of boring CEOs, he leads the charge as the master of anti-ad marketing strategies.

Don’t believe me? Turn on notifications for his tweets:

Wondering what his playbook consists of? Let’s try to break it down.

On this late Monday night at 1 AM, I’m gonna take a swing at distilling 4 lessons out of Elon’s playbook.

Pause The Crown TV show and let’s dive in.

Show up as a human

Most of you take social media too seriously.

Our boy Elon doesn’t for a second.

He’s the wreck-it-ralph of Twitter and he doesn’t give a damn who’s in his way. Unsubscribe if the language offends you but the fact is true.

And guess what? The crowd goes wild every time.

It’s refreshing to see people take the road less travelled.

Elon has been showing up consistently on Twitter for the past 13 years.

He tweets about whatever he wants — from memes to business updates.

He keeps it real 100% of the time.

He doesn’t aim to sit on the top and look down on those who look up to him. Instead, his brand is all about: I could and so can you.”

He’s also very reachable —

• he responds to tweets that address him or his brands,
• He replies to comments and
• acknowledges customer ideas

He’s what every major airline isn’t. Attentive to feedback and willing to act on it.

This makes him seem less like a well-oiled machine (which frankly is abundant on social media) — giving him a major brand distinctiveness.

The lesson?

Put yourself out there. Be more than a business.

After all, how many tech leaders have you seen take over Saturday Night Live?

MEME your way to market?

I’ll bet you 1,000 dogecoin that funny content is one of the highest ROI content categories...?

Wanna call my bluff? Hold my beer ??

Turns out getting conversions doesn’t need perfect content. Just hire the funniest person you know.

Elon once said, ‘Who controls the memes, controls the universe’ and it checks out. .

But why are memes taking over the marketing world?

Because our attention spans have decreased to dangerous levels.

Memes are like a fresh breath of Canadian mountain air after you’ve visited the congested streets of the big city.

People on social media want to have a good time. There’s no doubt about that.

Elon knows how to deliver that every single time.

Own your failures

Part of Elon’s brand is to take enormous risks and endure multiple failures to turn them into successes.

He said:

“If something is important enough, you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure”.

He openly admits he has made many mistakes and makes a hearty joke out of them as he continues to shoot for the Moon (or should I say Mars?).?

The lesson here is: own your mistakes. Humans make errors. That’s okay, hiding them is not.

People buy from people, and people are far from perfect.

Owning up to your failures makes you likable. It makes people understand you.

Sell dreams, not products

Watching Elon’s ideas is like watching a Marvel movie.

It has all the components: super machines, transportation that defies standards and inhabiting other planets.

He aims to make the impossible come true. And a crowd gathers to watch with popcorn every attempt.

Things could have easily turned out against him, and people could have assumed that he is just a hoax, but he goes above and beyond to make them believe.

An example of this is an image featured by SpaceX in the Falcon Heavy Rocket launch promo:

This perfectly delivered Elon’s message:

“We’re heading into the future. You should come too — in a Tesla”.

Elon’s ideas enliven the dream-like future that we’ve all imagined and talked about as kids...

The takeaway: appealing to dreams is a powerful marketing strategy — it helps you tap into people’s desires and invites them along for the journey of a lifetime.

—

Musk doesn’t play by the rules, he creates his own.

Now that you know his playbook, what page are you gonna try out?

?? Riff of the Day

Great thread on remembering wealth is the power of free time, not the access to possessions.?

Thanks for reading. Got feedback? Let me know .

Catch you next week.

??? Joel

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