Osram Bulb's Out-of-the-box Marketing Strategy Will Blow Your Mind

If you ever watched “Shark Tank” or “Dragon’s Den,” you would probably know how difficult it is to pitch your idea. You may have a great product that can conquer the world, but it would just remain an idea or a concept if you cannot sell.

A few months back, when I started writing, I always wanted it to be a side hustle, and like most beginners, I have read thousands of articles on how to make money as a writer by pitching your stories at multiple places.

While this sounds easy, but that is the most challenging part of the entire game.

While reading on the topic, I came across this excellent case study on Osram that provides a beautiful insight into the technique of pitching your proposal using out-of-the-box marketing ideas.

The story will help you think and use unique techniques that you can use to acquire clients or present a game-changing idea to your senior management for acceptance.

The story dates back to early 1900s Europe. A time where the electrical revolution was at its peak, and light bulbs were no less than technological miracles.

During this time, every company in the market was out with new light bulbs, and dealers desperately tried to convince anybody and everybody who could be their potential customers.

Like it always happens, company salesmen didn’t get any attention due to too many choices, and people just shooed them away.

It was the time the tungsten filament light bulb was considered to the industry’s standard. It was used in homes, offices, warehouses, and even factories.

But a British company named Osram came out with a game-changing invention — they came out with low-energy, low-cost light bulbs.

These light bulbs were ten times costlier than the tungsten filament light bulb, but they consumed twenty percent less energy and lasted fifty times longer.

Ready to market their super-efficient bulbs, Osram started their market research to identify target consumers. With the results, they understood that these light bulbs would specifically benefit the warehouses and the factories because the homes and offices users only had one or two bulbs in the room.

Against this, the warehouses used hundreds of bulbs placed at a thirty-foot height. The changing of these bulbs was a tiresome process, so they had to specially employ laborers to change the light bulbs frequently.

Osram Bulbs Faces Sales Challenges

So Osram moved ahead to market their product to these warehouses, thinking the bulbs would sell like hotcakes.

But when the marketers tried pitching their product, they faced a significant problem.

When they tried to pitch the bulbs to the maintenance manager in charge of the warehouse, he said that the finance department had given him a stringent budget, and they would never get approval to spend ten times more money just on bulbs.

So Osram tried to convince the finance guys but failed severely as the finance guys passed on the buck to the maintenance team, saying,

I don’t know anything about the light bulbs; please go and talk to the maintenance guy.

So basically, this was the same old story of passing the parcel Osram experienced with all the factories and warehouses and ended up without any sales.

After multiple failures, Osram knew their traditional marketing strategy was not working. They went back to the drawing board and came out with a brilliant idea.

Osram's marketing strategy works wonders

Osram sent a mysterious letter to both the finance and the warehouse guys. Suddenly, they started getting orders within a month, and soon enough, hundreds of factories all across the country had Osram bulbs.

So, what exactly was this special letter that could convince these guys so quickly, without any pitch?

Osram sent a cashbox and a letter to the finance guy. They locked the cash box, and the letter said, “this box contains an idea that can save you fifty thousand euros a year, and the key to this box is with the maintenance manager.”

The maintenance manager also received a similar letter that said, “the box is with the finance guy.”

The curiosity created by Osram worked wonders and got both the finance manager and warehouse manager to connect and open the box together. When they opened the box, it had another letter with a detailed calculation about the new bulb’s cost and how much it will save in terms of labor, bills, and maintenance.

The last line read, “hence this bulb will save you fifty thousand euros a year.” Further, the letter said, “if you’re on board, let’s get in touch,” and the letter provided Osram’s sales contact at the end.

So, this was the brilliant out-of-the-box strategy that Osram used to solve the problem of getting both the finance guy and the maintenance guy together. Both these gentlemen ended up discussing the feasibility of the procedure and presented the same calculations to their upper management.

The policy got approved, and Osram was able to make a million dollars just by giving different calculations to different authorities depending on the size of the factory or their warehouse.

Key Learnings

#1) Always talk to the decision-maker

The most challenging thing to do is not pitching your idea but finding the decision-maker who will either approve or deny your concept.

In today’s world, the internet has provided tools like Linkedin and Twitter, wherein decision-makers all across the globe are just a few clicks away.

If you got an idea or need an internship, do your research and connect with the decision-makers. Drop them an email and see the magic happen, and just in case you happen to find that there are two to three decision-makers, all you have to do is mark each one a copy.

#2) Always start with the benefit to your customer

In this case, had Osram sent a long list of calculations, nobody would have bothered to read the letter. But they started with a statement that was hard to ignore (“this could save you fifty thousand euros”).

This statement was a hook and upfront informed the reader that their time spent reading the calculation was an investment with great returns and not a waste of time. Hence they paid attention to those long lists of calculations.

If you use the same analogy to email marketing, the subject is supposed to present your service’s direct benefit to your client. For example, if you are applying to be a writer, your subject line could be, “I will scale your readership by 15k readers within a month”

After that, you can give a detailed analysis in the email body on the number you just quoted, and you will surely enjoy a higher read rate.

When it comes to a client meeting, you got to pitch the benefit in the first two minutes because, regardless of who your client is and whatever business you deal in, the only thing that they care about is profit.

Once they know the value of your analysis, they will automatically pay attention even if the presentation is a little boring.

#3) Justify your claim

Most importantly, when you draw a calculated projection and prove how you can deliver upon your claims, there is nothing more impressive than that because it says how much you know about the client’s industry and gives credibility to your pitch.

This case study taught me a lot about pitching my ideas and the impact of never tried before unique solutions. It may sometimes be considered risky, but it’s worth trying something out-of-box if the traditional approach is not doing good.

Author's Note:

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References:

Original Source: My Stories in Branding Stories publication on Medium.com

My original story on Medium.com