So we've talked about a couple of ways now to get people to ease uncertainty. But I want to talk about a third one, and this one is called driving discovery. A good way to think about this is to go back to that area of test drives for cars. So imagine you're Acura, for example, you're the Acura brand, you have test drives. Think about who test drives your car or who doesn't test drive your car. Well, anyone who likes the brand would probably go check, take a test drive. Anyone who thinks they might like the brand, might go take a test drive. But who doesn't? Well, anyone who doesn't know the brand exists and doesn't think they'd like it. So test drives are great for people who already know about your brand, they already know you exist. But they're not going to be very helpful for people who don't know you or have never heard about you or don't think they like you. Imagine, you're a challenger brand in a certain category, you're just as good as the brand people are already using, but they've never heard about you before. Well, they're probably not going to take the time to show up at your metaphorical dealership, or go to your particular company or location to try something out. How do we get around that? This is actually the exact issue that Acura dealt with about a decade ago. People loved Acura. The people who'd driven an Acura before went ahead and bought a new one every time their old car ran into problems. But there weren't enough people like that. There weren't enough people who already had Acuras and buying new ones. Acura had been in the United States a decade longer than Lexus, but Lexus was killing them in market share. People weren't aware that Acura is a good brand and they didn't think they'd like it. So Acura thought about test drives with the promise that's not going to solve appealing to a new customer base. So what could they do? Well, they did something quite clever. They paired with W Hotels and anyone who is staying at a W Hotel could get a ride anywhere in town in an Acura. Need a ride to the airport? Get a ride in an Acura. Need a ride to your meeting? Get a ride in an Acura. Anywhere you needed to go, you could get a ride in an Acura for free. You don't have to know what an Acura was, you don't have to think you'd like the car, you just needed a ride anywhere. So you took one for free in the back of an Acura. Now, did all the people who took one of these rides end up buying an Acura? No, certainly not. But tens of thousands of people did. Why? Because it took a whole segment who never knew Acura existed or didn't think they'd like it and got them to experience the offering. Again, Acura figured out how to lower the barrier to trial, but they did so by driving discovery. They bought the trial to people. So this is a very clever but important idea. In many cases, sometimes people might like what we're offering, but they don't know it, and so they're not willing to go ahead and get the trial. We need to bring the trial to them. Verizon, for example, is dealing with the roll-out of 5G. So they're saying, "Hey, we've got this new 5G service, it's better than 4G." But consumers were a little bit confused. How do I know that 5G is going to be better? How do I know it's worth switching from my existing provider to Verizon's 5G network? I know 5G is more than 4G, it's definitely is 1G or 25 percent more Gs. I don't know what that means, but maybe it's better. Is it worth spending the money to switch? Is it worth the cost of getting a new phone provider? How do I know? So rather than encouraging people to come to them, Verizon brought the trial to people. They drove discovery. They brought 5G coverage to a number of NFL stadiums, as the season began. You could show up at a stadium, not be interested in Verizon, just want to watch the game. You could use their network for free and see how much faster it was to load videos and do various other things, experiencing the value of the offering. Kia did the same thing. A number of years ago, they had revamped their brand. They had a lot higher quality, but people didn't know that yet. So they could ask people to test drive a Kia, but no one was really interested in doing it. They did something else. They encouraged people to check out Kias by putting a bunch of Kias in rental car fleets. So you shop at the airport, you rented from Hertz or whatever company you've rented from, you show up and they give you a Kia. You might not have been the most excited to get a Kia, but that's the car they assigned you so you drive it off to your meeting and you end up learning that it's better than you thought. You might not have gone to a Kia dealership to take a test drive, but because Kia was the rental car you were assigned, you checked it out. We did the same thing a few years ago when I was doing a consulting project with a company called Redwood Living. They rent single-family apartments. People who live there love their apartments, but there aren't enough people coming to check them out. So they thought about sprucing up the model home, make it easier for people to check out what would it be like to live in that location. But a bunch of people didn't want to show up at a place and check out the model home if they didn't know they liked it. So one question we had is, how can we bring the trial to people? How can we get people to experience what a great offering this is if they don't know already? So we hit on an interesting solution. We just asked existing residents to have more of their friends over, have more parties, have a Super Bowl party, have your friends there for thanksgiving, have a New Year's Eve party. We gave away Magnum bottles of champagne or coupons for six-foot long subs. I don't know about you. It's hard to eat a six-foot long sub yourself so you have some friends over, and by the way, those friends learn how great Redwood is, from you because you've been living there. They see, they experience of what it's like to actually live there from the perspective of an existing user, and so they're much more likely to do it themselves. Again, not forcing them to come check out the trial, but driving discovery, bringing the trial to them.
