Pop quiz: Name an industry where a premium brand owns a massive 70% of its market.
Can’t? That’s OK.
Despite dominating a few news cycles over the last couple weeks, the answer is more surprising than you might think: headphones. Beats, the premium headphones brand Apple reportedly plans to buy for $3.2 billion, absolutely dominates its market.
How? As Inc. points out in this recent article, the company’s founders, hip hop moguls Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, borrowed the shrewd strategy and lightning fast execution they learned in the record industry to help build their headphone empire.
You can be doing the same thing. Straight from the Beats playbook, here are three simple tactics you can use:
Latch onto pop culture.
Does an A list celebrity show up on the runway sporting item’s from your look book? Or how about an NBA player to a playoff game? Your digital toolset should allow you to capitalize—and, within hours, tie newly curated content and product across web, email, and social channels.
Listen to your customers.
When Dre and Iovine were developing the Beats prototypes, they never missed an opportunity to ask their potential customer base what they thought about them.
Likewise, look at your promotional calendar. Your toolset should allow you to break your next big promotion into several variations, and use behavioral history, rewards information and more to make them relevant to your biggest audience segments.
Move fast.
Within 72 hours of a phone call from Will.i.am, Beats filmed and produced a massive Thanksgiving commercial. Again, evaluate your toolset—if you have to phone your vendor to execute an idea, if you have to wait two weeks for IT to get around to coding it, if you have to sift through your email database to determine who to send what—you are in grave danger of your competitors blowing by.
Do these tactics actually work? Well, while their competitors are giving headphones away for free, Beats has convinced their customers to pay $300 for a pair. In doing so, the company has gobbled up 70% of the market.
Your competition is closing in… these tactics will help you “Keep Their Heads Ringing.”
This post originally ran on the Monetate Blog.
