If a hole in a sock triggers a global success

If a hole in a sock triggers a global success

Time Stamp: January 25, 2024 4:57 PM
Source Node: 3084095

What does a black sock have to do with entrepreneurial marketing? It all begins with an anecdote. Called last minute for a meeting with a client, our freshly graduated business school consultant found himself at a sushi dinner in a private home with a Japanese client. This implied taking off shoes. Not only were the consultant’s two socks mismatched in colour, but one also had a hole in the big toe. An epic fail!

The embarrassment experienced by our consultant, Samy Liechti, sparked the idea for an entrepreneurial project as simple as it was innovative: producing and selling black socks through a subscription model. The startup, founded in 1999 with Marcel Roth, is named Blacksocks and has gone places as a pioneer in e-commerce.

Doing more with less

Discussed in International Entrepreneurship by Antonella Zucchella, Birgit Hagen, and Manuel G. Serapio (Edward Elgar Publishing), this story merits telling us that not only is “doing more with less” possible, but it also represents a distinctive point for a company stepping into a crowded world.

Let’s try to understand, therefore, what lessons we can draw for our marketing and entrepreneurial projects. How did our co-founders transform a product that is essentially a commodity into a conversation piece?

Start from the need, the rest will follow

Certainly through a combination of factors. The first aspect to consider is having touched a nerve within the business community, namely avoiding “sock sorrow“. This allowed them to have a very well-defined target audience in a niche market, enabling economies of scale and rapid growth.

This, in turn, was possible thanks to the ability to always keep great attention on their product through targeted and creative communication actions, such as signing a “countertrade” agreement with business press publishers and major airlines, where loyalty points or miles could be used for Blacksock subscriptions. They also participated in marathons wearing the iconic black socks and created limited editions of their socks in partnership with other creatives. In short, a combination of strategic positioning and marketing creativity resulted in positive word-of-mouth and traffic for the website.

Finally, the company went the extra mile by increasingly involving its customers in the co-creation process, as explained by Zucchella, Hagen, and Serapio. Which strengthened the bonds with their community, with a positive impact on the costs to acquire new customers which means a higher profitability.

What can we learn?

  1. Identifying a latent need or common problem – The ability to identify latent needs or shared problems in everyday life is the holy grail of any entrepreneur who wants to succeed.
  2. Differentiating through creativity and strategic positioning: Creativity per se can be shortsighted if not supported by effective strategic thinking, which is aimed to underpin the effort to stand out in crowded markets (especially when you are selling a commodity).
  3. Engaging customers in the co-creation process: Blacksocks actively involves its customers in the co-creation process, allowing them to participate and contribute to the development of the product, with a positive impact and the overall customer experience, which could result in new customers for less.

In other words, if we want to play the business game either as a marketer or an entrepreneur we cannot escape the need to look at the big picture and take a holistic approach. And even a hole in the sock will trigger a global success (hopefully so!).

Photo by Gabrielle Henderson on Unsplash

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