It’s been a little over a week since we launched our campaign for Teacher’s Day and we successfully made a few sales. However, as the campaign was playing out we were (again) reminded that our messaging on “What exactly is Folklory” wasn’t clear. So, we made a decision to narrow down how we want to position Folklory, by focusing on one use case - Birthday gifts for (older) Parents. In today’s issue, we share our thinking behind this and what this means for Folklory.
Folklory for Everything = Folklory for Nothing
When we started, we saw Folklory as a way to “capture and preserve memories of your loved ones”. We imagined people using it to create audio albums of birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, simple gestures of appreciation and so much more. But the reality was that all this existed only in our heads. The average person on the street didn’t understand what Folklory was and even when we explained it to them, they were unsure how to use it. Our website didn’t focus on any single use case and only listed a few examples from previous customers. Thus, to a potential customer, we had no answer to a simple question “How can Folklory help me?” - and our hypothesis is that is the reason for low sales on the consumer side.
Birthdays for Parents
In order to fix this, we decided to narrow it down to a niche. When deciding what that niche should be, we looked back to identify the best Folklories we had done.
What were the Folklories that were easiest to explain to the guests?
What were the Folklories where the customers had the clearest ideas of why they wanted it?
From the 200+ Folklories we have done, which did we feel uncovered the most impactful and meaningful memories and stories, based on feedback from the guests, customers, and recipients?
The answer was clear - a Folklory purchased as a Birthday Gift for a Parent. When we analyzed what made this theme ideal, we noticed some of the following reasons
Deadlines create urgency: Birthdays have a clear deadline and since everyone involved (the customer and guests) is aware of this, things move fast. People book recording schedules quickly and show up on time.
Beyond Material Gifts: Deciding on what to buy a parent, especially an elder one, as a birthday gift is difficult because they probably have everything they need. The challenge of finding a meaningful gift was why many people bought Folklory. What I personally like, is that each Folklory requires you to devote time - your most precious resource - towards the person and take a moment to express appreciation towards them. This is really special.
Everyone has Birthdays: A trivial, but obvious reason for the large number of Birthday-themed Folklories is that everyone has a birthday. So even when we put on our numbers hat, we’re still targetting a pretty large market. Since birthdays happen every year, this also opens the possibility for happy customers to make repeat purchases.
And so we’ve decided to focus on this theme.
What’s next
In order to reflect this focus, we’ll be updating our website and social media platforms in the coming weeks. Our messaging to old and new customers will be around this new theme. We hope that this change makes it easier for new customers to understand how Folklory can help them, eventually resulting in growing sales. We plan on running this experiment for about a month after which we’ll assess if that’s the right way forward.
Going down this path means we’re consciously ignoring other use cases that we still believe strongly in. One in particular is capturing stories of people, especially in their golden years. A friend sent us this a few days ago and while this is precisely what we want Folklory to do, for now, it’s not our focus.
Until next time,
The Folklory Team