This week’s podcast is about Ruhnn Holding, KOLs / Influencers and Michael Porter’s Five Forces.

You can listen to this podcast here, which has the slides and graphics mentioned. Also available at iTunes and Google Podcasts.

Here is the link to the TechMoat Consulting.

Here is the link to the Tech Tour.

Here are the mentioned graphics.

Here are some factors to consider when assessing the bargaining power of buyers.

• Concentration of buyers: The fewer buyers, the more power they have.
• Purchase size: Buying in large volumes means better terms and more discounts.
• Differentiation of products or services: Sellers with unique products or services can command better prices (sometimes).
• Switching costs
• Price sensitivity: If customers are highly price-sensitive, buyers are more assertive and aggressive.
• Informed buyers: If customers are savvy, they know the competitive terrain well and will get better prices.

Here are some factors to consider when assessing competitive rivalry.

• Number of competitors: The more competitors in an industry, the fiercer the rivalry.
• Industry growth rate: Slow growth rates usually lead to increased competition. In an expanding market, you can grow without taking someone else’s customers.
• Fixed costs: If an industry has high fixed costs, companies have a temptation to cut prices rather than slow production when demand decreases. Fixed costs often mean price wars.
• Exit barriers: When it’s difficult or costly for companies to exit an industry (usually because of specialized assets, contractual obligations, strategic objectives, emotional attachment, non-rational management), firms may choose to stay and compete. Even in a bad or worsening situation.
• Undifferentiated products / services: When the products or services in a market are similar, competition tends to be more intense because customers can easily switch.

Here are some factors to consider for New Entrants.

• Economies of scale: High startup costs and/or economies of scale can deter new entrants. Scale advantages in production can mean lower costs (per unit). So new entrants would need to achieve a similar scale to compete on price, which might be difficult, time-consuming or costly.
• Product differentiation: Established brands, customer loyalty and unique products can make it difficult or time consuming for new entrants to gain viable market share.
• Capital requirements: High startup costs (such as for equipment, facilities, etc.) can limit new entrants.
• Access to distribution channels. If you need access to retail stores, online platforms, whole partners or other channels, this can limit new entrants. It’s often much harder to enter if you need to replicate both the product and the distribution structure – and while competing with incumbents on price.
• Government regulations: Licensing, safety standards, and other regulations can create barriers to entry.
• Switching costs: If customers have difficulties switching from existing firms to new entrants, this can reduce the threat.

Here are some factors to consider for assessing the Threat of Substitutes.

• Availability of substitutes: Alternative products or services can reduce the demand for an industry’s offerings.
  • High-quality substitutes available at competitive prices can definitely impact demand.
  • However, switching costs for going from existing products or services to substitutes can reduce the threat.
• Availability of close substitutes (i.e., “the sense that products are similar”): If buyers perceive that there are few differences between your product and a substitute, they are much more likely to switch. Close substitutes can be:
  • Potential substitutes, which are very different from a company’s products but consumers still treat them as the same.
  • Genuinely similar products, where the threat of substitutes is high, such as between brand-name and generic medications.
• Relative price performance: If the cost of a substitute is lower and its performance is comparable or better, customers are likely to switch to the substitute.
• Customer willingness to go elsewhere: The threat is high if buyers find it easy to switch to a substitute.

Here are some factors to consider for Supplier Power.

• The number and concentration of suppliers: When only a few firms can give a company something it needs to stay in business, they have greater negotiating power. They can raise prices or reduce quality with less fear of losing business. Fewer suppliers can usually negotiate better prices and terms.
  • Substitutes decrease this. The availability of substitutes can reduce suppliers’ bargaining power.
  • Low-cost position increases supplier power. Suppliers with low costs can negotiate better prices.
• Uniqueness and differentiation: If a supplier provides a unique or differentiated product, it’s not as easy to find an alternative and switch. Suppliers offering unique products or services can command better prices.
• Switching costs: If it’s costly or time-consuming to switch suppliers, then they have more power. Businesses are less likely to switch, even if prices increase.
• Forward integration: If suppliers have the ability to move into the buyer’s industry, they have more power. Even if they don’t actually do it. They already have access to the necessary supplies.
• Industry importance: Certain sectors are tightly intertwined in terms of operations and/or technology. An example is automotive suppliers and the major auto companies. This can balance the power between the suppliers and buyers in. Everyone needs each other long term.

Cheers, Jeff

• Ruhnn Holding Is a Good Example of an Influencer-Centric, Asset-Lite Ecommerce Business Model (1 of 2) (Tech Strategy)

———-

Related articles:

• Fans, Collectors and Gamblers: The Engine of Pop Mart (1 of 4) (Tech Strategy)
• Pop Mart and My Checklist for Fan and Enthusiast Behavior (2 of 4) (Tech Strategy)
• Microsoft’s 3 Big Upgrades to its 2 Platform Business Models (2 of 2) (Tech Strategy – Daily Article)

From the Concept Library, concepts for this article are:

• Influencer / KOLs Marketing
• Porter’s 5 Forces

From the Company Library, companies for this article are:

• Ruhnn

———-transcription below

Episode 220 – 5 Forces.2

Jeffrey Towson: [00:00:00] Welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Jeff Towson, and this is the Tech Strategy Podcast from TechMoat Consulting. And the topic for today, Michael Porter’s Five Forces, and why you don’t really want to try and be an influencer. For those of you who are subscribers, I sent you a couple articles this week about Ruhnn holdings, which is basically a marketing agency.

It’s kind of an e commerce company and a marketing agency out of China, but all based on influencer marketing. And when you look at that company, which I don’t necessarily think is worth your time, but it’s got some cool lessons in it. If you apply Michael Porter’s Five Forces to that company, or just the idea of being an influencer, you get a really solid answer really quickly that, hey, this is not a great business to be in.

Now, it’s a great activity to do to [00:01:00] complement a business, which is what I do, and a lot of people do. As a standalone business, ooh, it’s pretty hard. Anyways, I’m going to go into that, and I thought it would be just kind of fun. A good, simple example of Porter’s Five Forces. So, that will be the topic for today.

Let’s see. Standard disclaimer. Nothing in this podcast or my writing or website is investment advice. The numbers and information from me and any guests may be incorrect. The views and opinions expressed may no longer be relevant or accurate. Overall, investing is risky. This is not investment, legal, or tax advice.

Do your own research. And with that, let’s get into the topic. Now the concepts for today, really just Porter’s Five Forces, which is now technically Six Forces. He’s added compliments as his Six Fourths, I think. Which really was missing from the first five. You can’t really explain things like platform business models and a lot of digital things.

Without compliments and that wasn’t really in the original five forces, which was more of a linear business. It’s very applicable to linear business models [00:02:00] pipelines when you move into connectivity based business models, which is what I talk about a lot. Doesn’t work as well even with compliments. I don’t I don’t use it that much but I do do it for every company, and I regularly find it to be helpful.

But yeah, it’s, it’s not as great for the digital world. Okay, so that’s sort of one concept for today. The other is just sort of influencers and KOLs, key opinion leaders, which isn’t really a concept, but it’s a category. I’ll give you a quick Summary of Roon. I don’t want to go through this too much because I don’t think it’s relevant, but it’s basically a business that went public founded in 2014 in Hanjo really based on an influencer who was getting good traction and They turned this into two influencers three influencers, and then it sort of became Marketing agency for influencers which you sell their services to various brands and merchants in [00:03:00] addition You know, so they train they support they do all the operational aspects.

They do the agency aspects The other thing they do is they do online shops. So if you’re a successful Influencer, you have your own online store. So they make their money on e commerce sales and marketing fees. Kind of an interesting business model. They go public. Stock price didn’t do real well. It collapsed back.

They went private a couple years ago. 2019 they went public. 2021 they were taken private again. And for various reasons, one of which was, look, when you look at the revenue, 50 plus percent of it was coming from one to two influencers. So yeah, they had a hundred plus influencers. They worked with lots and lots of brands.

They had lots of online stores. But when you actually looked at the influencers and the money, it was coming from a couple people. And you know, the lesson in that is [00:04:00] becoming an influencer It’s like being on a hit TV show. Like, I want to be on a hit TV show like Friends, or Seinfeld, or Breaking Bad. Okay, that is awesome, but it’s really hard to predict that.

And it’s really hard to sustain that. That’s kind of like being an influencer. Hard to make it happen if you’re trying to make it happen. Hard to sustain it. Most influencers last a couple years. The vast majority of people who try, let’s like 95, 90 percent get nowhere. A small number gets some small traffic and a couple get, so it’s very, it’s like a very hits driven business.

Now if you pull it off, that’s great. The problem then is, it’s also like, if you get on the TV show Friends or some big hit, Breaking Bad, nobody thinks that’s gonna last forever. You know it’s a couple years. And then it’s probably going to be over. And that’s for most people like actors, that’s the only hit TV show they ever have.

[00:05:00] And they kind of live on the residuals for the rest of their life. It’s a little bit like that. So anyways, RUN, they get about 113 signed KOLs. They get 91, this is from their filings in 2019. 91 stores that are cell phone. They work with 501 brands. You know, they kind of get up to what they call fans, which is people who watch their influencers.

They get about 150 million quote unquote fans. 70 percent were women, 80 percent were millennials. And that was mostly coming 2019. From Weibo, WeChat, Twitter. and Weitao, which are kind of the big social media slash, you know, e commerce sites of China. Then, from then, it evolved into Kuaishou, TikTok, Bilibili, Red and the numbers got a little bit bigger, and then they went private, and now I don’t know what they are because they’re not saying.

So, what are they doing? They’re creating, you know, let’s sort of talk about [00:06:00] influencers, and then I’ll get to Five Forces. Influencers are awesome. Influencer marketing, is where it’s at, in my opinion it’s dramatically more powerful than traditional marketing. I mean, marketing in my, I’m not a digital marketing expert, but I think about it a lot.

You know, marketing traditionally was one directional, companies pump out information to a certain demographic. One way, blast, often mass market, marketing. Okay, when that goes online, 2000, 2005. It’s still sort of one directional, but it’s much more personalized and niche. Now you don’t have to do mass marketing to everyone, which is like what a television ad is or a billboard.

Everybody’s going to see it. Now you can use data and be very targeted and segmented in your niches. So we’ll call that, let’s say, digital niche marketing. Much better. But then [00:07:00] we get to social media and influencer, and the key thing here to think about is it’s no longer about a company connecting with a consumer.

That’s Traditional marketing, that’s niche marketing. It’s consumers connecting with other consumers about your product or your company. Those are the linkages you want to activate because there’s dramatically more connections between members of a demographic than there are between a company and the demographic.

You want to activate those. How do you activate them? Well, you have to create content. You have to create activities. You have to get people talking. It’s kind of word of mouth. This is just a digital version of it. That’s what influencers do. They are in the business of activating connections between consumers.

Get them talking, giving them content which they can share with their friends, getting them to respond to your post, getting [00:08:00] them to make reaction videos, things like that. They’re sort of creatures of social networks, almost entirely. So it’s a powerful thing. And I’ll get to why it’s so difficult, but you know, my, I deal with a lot of companies, and I have the same conversation all the time.

We all have to do influencer marketing because we all are in the attention business now, and getting attention is hard, keeping attention is hard. The most powerful tool you have in doing this is influencers, but it’s a hard game. It’s a game you can never really win, you can just play. And that’s just the nature of the world we live in.

Now, you need a strategy, so just accept it. It sucks, it’s hard, but we all got to do it. If you can build your business model with that as a complement, or an engine, or a feeder into another business model, you can do [00:09:00] quite well. If you are trying to live only on being a standalone influencer as a business, That’s really hard.

It’s a very precarious existence. What you want is to do something like, let’s say, e commerce for beauty, which I think is a really great space. You’re going to do a lot of content creation, you’re going to do a lot of influencing, a lot of getting attention, educational videos. inspirational videos, entertainment videos, content, all of that.

That gets you attention. It feeds into your e commerce business, which gets you recurring sales, because when people start using a beauty treatment, they use it week after week, week after week. So, you’re living on recurring e commerce as a business model, and the attention business is a good complement.

That’s very different than trying to live on influencer standalone business model, which I would say don’t try to do. Consultants, guys like me, we [00:10:00] put out a lot of content. We do a lot of influencing stuff, but that’s a, a branding exercise, an educational exercise. It’s a way of adding value to people who may be your clients or may not.

It’s a form of value add that you just don’t charge for. And a lot of businesses do that. I used to be in charge of a big shopping mall and sort of hotels and you know, office tower. So I’d see all the numbers every month. The money was in a couple places. It was in the Four Seasons Hotel up in the tower.

It was in the anchor stores at the end of the mall, the Marks and Spencer. But we also had a food court, and the food court was not good business. It didn’t make much money, and most of the restaurants struggled, and a lot of them went out. It was not a good business to live on, but it was a very good additional value add to the shopping mall and the whole offering.

[00:11:00] So, it was good, you just don’t want to live there. You wanted to, anyway, same point. That’s enough for run. Let me get into sort of five forces, which I think that’s pretty useful to go through this every now and then and sort of refresh your mind. So for those of you who have probably done this many times, here’s a little refresher on applying five forces to influencing in KOLs.

And what jumps out almost immediately is, Ooh, this is a really hard business. Like it jumps out immediately. Okay. So every time I go through a company, I. I just run my checklist. I’ve been doing this forever. They’re pretty long, actually. It’d take me a couple hours to get through all my checklists. But in there, I always do five forces, and Yeah, it doesn’t take long.

It takes like five minutes. I’ll put literally my notes from I do everything longhand. I use stacks of paper and pens. I’ll literally put my little sketch drawing that I do for five forces. I mean, I’ve done this for, I don’t know how many, 500 companies. [00:12:00] It’s kind of simple. Anyways, you can see my notes.

I’ll put it in the show notes. So if you run the five forces, I get one force is okay. It’s fine. And the other four are really, really bad for, for this company, Ruin Holdings, which is, I don’t want to pick on them. But, For being an influencer business overall, I would say the same thing. Now, if you’re influencer plus e commerce, that’s different, but I’m just saying like if most of your money, if you’re living and dying based on having successful influencers with lots of fans, the, the graphic would be really the same.

So four out of five look really bad. Now, I always start with the bargaining power of the buyers. You know, the old saying at the, you know, all business begins and ends with the customer. So those are the buyers. You’re the seller. They’re the buyer. So you’re basically connecting with people on your smartphones, and unfortunately, [00:13:00] If you’re an influencer, you do not own those connections at all.

Weibo owns them, WeChat owns them, Instagram owns them, Facebook owns them, LinkedIn, Twitter. I mean, you are seriously disintermediated from your customers, your viewers, your fans, whatever you call that. And that’s true on pretty much all these dominant social media and or entertainment platforms. Yeah, it’s brutal, and they can change the rules on you at any time, which they do regularly, and it’s not just that, they can change the algorithm, they can change the policies which might, like if you’re an influencer, and they change the policies which has been happening in China.

One of the things they don’t like is if you’re trying to sell stuff. Hey, I’m giving a video go buy my Special pair of socks you have to put a link in to take the customer out of the site somewhere else Well, most of these social media platforms do not [00:14:00] like that So they will down rank or they will just forbid you from putting in those sorts of links because they don’t want you taking their customers Off site now some of them are now doing e commerce within like tick tock now has tick tock shop But so policies can change that’s bad The algorithm can change So even if you have traffic last week, you could be doing the same videos 3 months later and get much less.

You didn’t change anything, they changed. And this is where you really have a problem because your interest as an influencer runs counter to the interests of the big platforms. What do the big platforms really care about? TikTok, Facebook, YouTube. They want to democratize content creation. They don’t want content creators, which is one side of their platform business model, to be heavily concentrated in a [00:15:00] small number of people.

And influencer types benefit from a power law. If you have a lot of followers, you get more followers because people see that and they click on. So, Over time, these people who create on these platforms, there is a power law, you get more and more. Well, the platform actively stops that. They want everyone to be able to come onto a platform and to get traction.

So they democratize, they give lots of tools and services to anyone creating content that lets you create high quality stuff, even if you’re just one dude in a basement. TikTok did this, right? To be a YouTuber, you used to have to have like a studio and a camera and have Adobe Premiere. Now you can just use CapCut, you can just use your phone and you can make videos.

So they want as many content creators as possible and they want viewership to be democratized. Because [00:16:00] if you do that, if you have more content creators and more types of content, the service is better. And your network effect gets more powerful the more long tail content you have. Well, that is exactly the opposite of what an influencer wants.

So, the platform is always working against you. So generally speaking, the situation if you’re an influencer on one of these platforms, it’s not good. It’s pretty much the same as being an actor on a hit TV show, and the hit TV show is run by NBC or whatever. Okay, you’ve done well, but you’re really playing a game created by someone else, and you’re just a supplier or a vendor in a game that you don’t control.

That’s just the way it is. Now, when you break down sort of bargaining power of buyers I put in some factors you can think about. That’s my assessment for KOLs and [00:17:00] influencers, but there’s actually a list you can run. Concentration of buyers, purchase size, differentiation, price sensitivity, informed buyers.

I’ll put the list in the show notes. It’s pretty good to run those specific questions when you’re thinking about this. So that one’s bad. The next one I always go to is competition rivalry, which is, okay, who are you competing with today? Who are your existing rivals? So in this case, it would be either RUN competing with other agencies, or really, it’s about influencers competing with influencers.

Unfortunately, the rivalry for KOLs, Super intense, hyper competition, very difficult to predict who’s going to win, very difficult to sustain any sort of leadership. It’s bad. As I said, like, anyone can make videos. Every year, the platforms are [00:18:00] creating tools and services to make, they want everyone in the world to be a content creator.

This is like, you know what’s really bad, is if you’re an author. I’m an author. The amount of rivalry you have as an author is unbelievable. Because you’re gonna post your book up on Amazon or Barnes and Noble, whatever, digital books. Self publish. Every year, millions of books get published, and you’re not just competing against the millions, you’re competing against the millions from the last 25 years, because books don’t go obsolete very much.

So, the amount of rivalry you have as a book author is unbelievable. It’s like, it’s like the worst business ever. At least videos go obsolete, and if you’re talking about current trends or current events, it goes obsolete. You know, most books don’t, well, they do go obsolete, but not as fast. Yeah, and anyone with a laptop can basically become an author.

So, yeah, it’s terrible. It’s important, I do it, but as a business, I literally don’t [00:19:00] even check the money from my books. I have like ten books. I can’t even think of the last time I checked the, the royalties. Like, I know it’s, it’s there, I know it’s going into banking, I don’t, I don’t even know what it is.

It’s, it’s not huge, it’s whatever. Anyways, okay, anyone can post videos, livestream content the rivalry is almost unlimited. And not only that, but if you’re going to stay in this fight. It’s like an arms race that never ends. You can’t just keep doing what you’ve been doing. You have to keep upgrading your tools and your content type all the time.

If everyone starts using, I don’t know, time delay videos or time lapse or slow motion or 360 cameras and you’re a travel vlogger, you’ve got to start doing that. If people start to make reaction videos and get lots of videos, you got to do that. So you have to keep upgrading your tools. This is, this really hits merchants and [00:20:00] brands that are doing advertising on sites like Alibaba or Amazon.

They have to continually be upping their spending on marketing. To buy new tools and new capabilities and new data packages and all of that just to stay in the game. Which is kind of how those big platforms make their money. They create a never ending competition that requires marketing spend and other types of spend buying tools and stuff.

It’s pretty brutal. So getting traction is hard, sustaining it is hard. Even the biggest YouTubers like Casey Neistat and all these, they’re pretty much gone. Very few people last more than two, three, four years. The ones that actually is kind of a funny example is pretty girls, like pretty girls on TikTok and Instagram.

They can probably get [00:21:00] viewers faster than almost anybody, which is why people are always putting attractive women in their thumbnails. It really does play out in terms of getting initial viewership very, very quickly. The interesting thing about that is it doesn’t last very long. The level of engagement you get just by posting pretty pictures is very shallow.

And people get bored, and then a new pretty girl, or it could be pretty guy, but it’s mostly pretty girls, comes along. So people talk about, oh, you have all these, you know, attractive women in videos and in thumbnails and they get attention, and that’s true. But it lasts a couple months, and then it fades away.

It’s really, so getting attention is very different than keeping attention. So, if you take apart competitive rivalry, you look at things like number of competitors, you look at the growth rate of an industry. If an industry is growing, you don’t have to get viewers by taking them from [00:22:00] someone else. That makes the rivalry less intense.

Fixed costs. If there’s a lot of fixed costs in an industry, And you’re not getting viewership or sales. People will tend to just discount their prices because you’ve already spent the money. So you get price wars a lot if you’re in a business like this with a lot of fixed costs. Exit barriers. If it’s hard to exit a business, people will stay in longer than they should have.

That can make the rivalry more intense. If your products are not differentiated, if everyone’s doing the same thing, the rivalry is more. Anyways, there’s five or six factors. None of this is my thinking. It’s pretty standard Porter stuff. I’ll put the factors in the show notes as well. Anyways, rivalry is bad.

Okay, I’m going to speed up here. We got three more. Next one, thread of new entrants. This is barriers to entry, basically. Yeah, as mentioned, there’s an [00:23:00] endless sea of new entrants, people that can jump in and become your competitors at KOL. And as mentioned, The platform business models that control all this, they are trying to bring on as many people as humanly possible.

They’re always wanting more creators. And the number one way they do this is by creating tools and services that let people become creators. And pretty much anyone can do it. And generative AI is giving everyone the ability to do almost anything in terms of content. So that’s a particularly bad situation.

And the other problem there is, There’s huge demand to do this. Like, people really want to be in this business. For a couple reasons. If you’re selling anything in this world, you’ve got to do this stuff. You’ve got to create content. People want attention. They want to be well known. There’s a tremendous psychological urge to be on camera and to do all this.[00:24:00]

And then third, I would say there’s, so people will do this even if they’re making no money. And they’re getting no traction. They will keep creating content. And then third, there’s a little bit of what I call the creator’s instinct. People find it very satisfying to create things, like paintings. Well, this is like that.

People will paint and create videos even if they get no views. And so if you’re in a business and you’re competing with a sea of people, existing rivals and new rivals, and they will all stay in your business even if they don’t make money, that’s bad. Alright, number four, threat of substitute products.

What could they do as a substitute to watching these videos or reading articles or whatever? Well, yeah, unfortunately there are a sea of acceptable substitutes in the world of entertainment and education. And things like that. Yeah, you can watch videos on YouTube. You can watch TikTok. [00:25:00] You can listen to podcasts.

You can read books. I mean, Entertainment has an endless list of sub well, not endless, but it’s really long. That’s bad. And, unfortunately, most of the substitutes are either very low cost or free. Like, one of the questions I always have on my business checklist is, Is this business competing with a lower cost or free substitute?

Is there another product or service that is an acceptable substitute for my product and it’s lower cost and or free? That’s terrible. If that exists, there’s basically almost a limit on what you can charge. I don’t like low cost substitutes. Anyways, we can go through threat of substitutes There’s a couple of factors here, I’ll put them in the show notes.

Availability of substitutes the price performance, the customer’s willingness to change how differentiated [00:26:00] is it, things like that. Alright, and that brings us to the last one, which is the bargaining power of the suppliers. And this is sort of the silver lining in all of this, which is, okay, who are our suppliers?

Well, our suppliers, if we’re an agency, we have two suppliers. We have merchants and brands that want to get their attention for their products and are hiring us. And we have KOLs who want to be part of our agency. Okay. We’re in really good shape with those two groups, because let’s say you’re a KOL.

Everything I just mentioned is bad. It’s true. It’s a difficult business to be in. However, it is worse for merchants and brands without KOLs because they have the same fundamental problem, which is we need to get attention for our products and services. We don’t [00:27:00] know how to do that and they can try and, what are their choices?

They can try and create their own influencers, which we’ve just said is hard, or they can hire So this game that we’re all playing, the attention game, it’s hard for everybody, but it’s harder for some people than others. So, you know, if you’re a, if you’re an e commerce site doing beauty and you have a couple popular influencers in house that were maybe the founders of the company, that’s a pretty decent business.

And you’re in much better shape than a large sort of corporate brand. Corporate brands, large companies, they have a harder time becoming influencers because they’re viewed as corporate and not sort of personal and authentic. It’s really the big If you’re a small business competing against a big business, let’s say in beauty products, your [00:28:00] two biggest strengths are always, almost always, we are faster.

We can make decisions faster and move faster. And two We can be more personal and authentic. We can put ourselves on camera and talk. Most big L’Oreal’s and whatever can’t do that. People don’t want to have relationships with big corporate entities, but they can identify with someone who’s from their neighborhood who’s talking about their product, right?

So, authenticity and speed are usually your best weapons. And Authenticident usually means content creation creating communities, being online, chatting with people, things like that. So anyways, so the supplier power situation is quite good for these companies. Well, yeah, they’re basically better than the buyer situation.

So that’s kind of the five so four things are bad but, yeah. It’s, it’s a funny thing that we all have to B2C or increasingly in the B2B business. [00:29:00] We mostly have to play the attention game, and more and more the attention game is about creating content. Not as a form of marketing, even though that’s how it’s described, as a way of adding value to potential customers just to do it.

And, and, well run, in my opinion, companies, they create a suite of value for their customers, and only a small portion of it is actually monetized by sales. But the rest of it, education, entertainment, community, all of those things, they don’t charge for those anymore. You know, but if You’re reading someone’s content, and you’re part of their community, and you’ll probably buy a pair of sneakers that they’re selling from time to time.

So, the breadth of value you add has been increased, and that’s a lot of what this is about. Okay, I think that’s kind of what I wanted to go through for today. A little bit longer than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, so the [00:30:00] concepts, Michael Porter’s Five Forces, and you know, the whole Influencer game, which is Which is great fun.

But it’s a little bit inherently frustrating. As for me, I’m hoping this audio is going to come out. I’m literally sitting in a cabin up in the mountains of Bohol, Philippines. So that’s an island in the Philippines. I’m kind of deep up in the mountains here. There’s literally jungle everywhere around me.

But I’m in a cabin, an Airbnb with surprisingly fast Wi Fi. Which is pretty cool, actually. So hopefully the audio will work out fine. Yeah, this has turned out to be my favorite island in the Philippines, Bohol. For those of you familiar, I’m in Loboc, which is the Kind of where they have those river cruises and you can keep going up the mountain.

I’m up the mountain quite a ways in the middle of the jungle. We’re gonna bug out of here after I finish this and scooter around. Maybe go hiking in the jungle, swim in a waterfall. [00:31:00] That’s the big plan for the afternoon. Swim for with some whale sharks in the morning. They’re not really sharks. I don’t know why they call them whale sharks.

They’re whales. But they’re right off the coast about 100 meters. So yeah, that’s the plan. It’s pretty awesome. We’re having a great time. Yeah, that’s kind of it for me from here. Oh, let me, I’ll give you one recommendation. Netflix has a new TV show called Influencer. I, I, I, on Netflix I watch everything out of Korea.

I love the Korean game shows like Influencer Popstar Academy. I think they’re awesome. Squid Game, obviously. Wait, is that Japanese or Korean? Nah, that’s one of the two. They have a new sort of competition game show Where they’ve taken the 47 most highly ranked influencers out of Korea, and they have them compete in competitions, but all the competitions are based on getting the metrics you need to be successful as an influencer.

Like do a live stream, [00:32:00] do a pop up store, get the most engagement, get the most new followers, and It is outstanding. Like, if you want to know how the influencer game really works, and what the tricks are, and what the metrics are that matter, watch this TV show. And not only do you see the key metrics that matter, engagement, feedback making people outraged getting people, all of that stuff, but you also see the tricks that each of these very successful influencers used to get on the board.

It was, I mean, I took all these notes on watching this thing. I was taking notes. It was fantastic. It was almost like a tutorial on how to be a KOL. Anyways, that’s Influencer. It’s on Netflix. It’s Korean. Fantastic show. Anyways, that is it for me. I hope everyone is doing well, and I’ll talk to you next week.

Bye bye.

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I write, speak and consult about how to win (and not lose) in digital strategy and transformation.

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