TESLA: THE TROJAN HORSE

TESLA.

When most people hear “Tesla,” they think about: the futuristic electric cars with the falcon-wing doors, their super-genius CEO and THAT viral cyber truck demonstration.

If you know nothing about Tesla, then, where you have been the last year? I haven’t seen the company out of the news over the last 12 months. From a huge announcement of putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet to putting a Tesla Roadster in space ( yes they really did that) and that’s without mentioning their CEO, Elon Musk who seems to have the whole world on strings.

Don’t let all this craziness distract you from the business side of the company though. Their recent quarterly earnings report showed a net income of $438 million for Q1 of 2020, with revenue surging 72%! (Source)

Yes, they really do have the numbers to back up all of their crazy stunts.

But what if I told you there is a chance Tesla, “The car manufacturer” is all just smoke and mirrors; that Tesla’s automobiles are simply, just a trojan horse…

Don’t believe me? Have a read of the “About Tesla” section on their website.

Here are a few things you should notice:

• Their mission statement: “To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.”

• Referring to the release of the Roadster it states: “The Roadster unveiled Tesla’s cutting-edge battery technology and electric powertrain.”

• The section signs off with: “Electric cars, batteries, and renewable energy generation and storage already exist independently, but when combined, they become even more powerful – that’s the future we want.”

Their mission is not focused on cars, but on renewable energy.

They couldn’t make this fact more clear when they talked about how the Roadster unveiled their new battery technology, rather than it simply being a newly released car.

Even their website doesn’t even refer to them as a car manufacturer.

Yes, Tesla manufacturer cars. But the true identity of Tesla is and always will be an energy company.

Breaking down the strategy

So, why in the world is Tesla promoting their cars; rather than their batteries and energy technologies?

Pushing their batteries is exactly what they are doing.

The Tesla cars are the marketing!

Tesla’s car manufacturing is one of the biggest examples of use case marketing, the world has ever seen.

So why in the world is Tesla using, use case marketing rather than more common marketing strategies?

Well, it’s important to understand that when Elon Musk came on board at Tesla in 2003, promoting Tesla as an electric battery company, most definitely wouldn’t have led to Tesla having a 738 billion-dollar market cap by 2021. (Source)

There simply wasn’t a market or the demand for batteries that can power cities back then. The world simply wasn’t ready for the technology that Musk and Tesla were developing.

Houses weren’t developed enough to use Tesla’s home battery products back in 2003 and society hadn’t come around to the idea of a fully electric battery-powered society.

Bearing in mind, the green energy market has only just begun to really develop over the last 5 years, with Tesla playing a big part in that development.

Notice, I refer to Tesla being in the green energy market and not just the energy market. This is as Tesla’s technology is (supposedly) meant to be a solution for how to utilise renewable energy effectively. Right now, the biggest issue with renewable energy is its inconsistency; making it heavily unreliable. For example, solar panels only generate power when the sun is shining. If you used them to power a whole city then the city’s power supply would be insufficient in winter.

Tesla bridges that gap through battery storage. They make it possible to store excess energy up in huge batteries and also individual home batteries, to allow cities and homes to still have power even when the renewable energy source isn’t producing enough electricity.

Tesla didn’t allow themselves to be held back by the fact society wasn’t ready yet, instead, they decided to show society that Tesla was ready. They decided to show the world just how useful electric batteries could be to the world.

Tesla showed that with batteries, our transport can be fueled with renewable energy.

Soon enough, they’ll demonstrate that with batteries, whole cities can operate off renewable energy. But they never would have had a chance to get to that point without putting Tesla on the map by utilising their technology in their cars!

The lessons

On this occasion, there are two huge lessons to take from this.

Firstly, at this point, you must realise that Tesla as a company, has barely even gotten started yet. I’d go as far as to say this is only the “prologue” of the story of Tesla. As a company with a current market cap of $739 billion dollars, it’s almost scary to think how big Tesla could be in the next 50 years. Especially, when you take into account that the demand for society to run off renewable energy is growing exponentially - probably not a bad idea to buy a few Tesla shares (not financial advice).

Secondly, and back to the marketing, Tesla made it very clear that use case marketing is a great thing to implement into your business. It has allowed Tesla to show and expose Tesla’s battery technology to the world. In a way that no marketing campaign ever could have - whilst bringing in huge amounts of revenue as they do it. It’s a win-win for Tesla and an absolutely incredible way to bring their battery and energy products to market.

How you can implement it

Of course, implementing use case marketing at the scale which Tesla does, is out of reach for nearly all businesses. This doesn’t mean that you can’t use it effectively to enhance your marketing.

3 steps to follow when using, use case marketing:

1. Think about ways that would show how great your product is. Which scenarios would your product add value to?

2. Consider which companies or people would benefit from your product. Get in contact with those people and see if they would be willing to use your product in their business.

3. Make sure everyone knows! As soon as your product is in use, it’s vital you show the world it’s working. Intel does a great job at this by ensuring all laptops that use their processors have their famous sticker on them!

This has been a breakdown of Tesla’s use case marketing strategy. I hope you have learned something and can implement a similar strategy into your business.

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I’ll see you next Sunday!