5 Best TED Talks Every E-commerce Enterpreneur Must Watch
If you decided to start your online business or have already been working in e-market, then no doubt – you are looking far ahead and moving with the last business tendencies.
Nowadays it is hard to imagine selling T-shirts, for instance, in an offline store and having no Instagram account or at least sharing photos of the goods on your Facebook page. In some cases, it may be the only advertising platform that attracts potential customers and, which by the way, is completely free. We prepared the list of the most relevant, to our point of view, TED talks for ecommerce entrepreneurs and also can inspire you with new ideas and decisions.
Have you ever considered what actually is happening in your brain when you are thinking of what college your kid would better go to or whether you should buy iPhone or Samsung smartphone? The first video we suggest you to watch is a TED talk by Barry Schwarz, an American psychologist, who explains why is it so difficult to make a choice and what a human feels when it comes to a big range of options that lie under this choice.
Barry Schwarz: The Paradox of choice, 2004
“Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice. We don’t inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day you must decide what kind of person you want to be.”
Barry Schwarz
What makes people want to buy an item you offer? What makes them lose interest and leave your store without a purchase? How can you influence their choices and increase their wish to become your customer?
Sheena Iylengar: How to make choosing easier, 2011
Techniques of handling choice overload problem:
- Cut
“Ask your employees to tell how all these choices are different from one another. If they can’t do that, neither can your consumers. ”
- Concretization
“Why do people spend more when they are using ATM cards or credit cards? Because it doesn’t feel like real money.”
- Categorization
“The category must tell something the chooser, not the choice maker.”
- Condition to complexity
“If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose.”
All the techniques the speaker describes are designed to help to manage your choices for you, for the people that you are serving.
Seth Godin: The tribes we lead, 2009
Once you are involved in commerce your lifestyle changes dramatically. When you are selling a good to a customer you are selling him the idea. You must persuade him that this pen or this phone is right what he needs and he highly needs to buy it at your store. When it comes to e-commerce the art of persuasion takes place. Your task becomes more complicated because you are not able to talk to your customer, and you do not even have any chance to see him. How can you sell your goods in this case? To some extent, sellers set trends and limit our choices. They have a limited range of items and they make you limit your preferences.
Popular marketing blogger Seth Godin put all aspects of leadership in order and explains how every person can lead a tribe to make other people share his ideas and values.
“You do not need permission to lead people. But in case you do – here it is. They are waiting for what will happen next.”
Seth Godin
Tim Leberecht: 3 ways to (usefully) lose control of your brand, 2012
Sometimes people see the same situation from different sides because they occupy different positions and perform completely different roles in the company. Someone performs certain work that is then estimated by somebody else and on the contrary, there is someone who estimates this work. It is a common situation in the company where bosses are those who decide whether your work was efficient or not. On the other side, employees feel that they are those necessary components that make this huge business machine (the company) earn money. Tim Leberecht, Frog’s marketer, tells how his company actually practices useful “beyond the control” techniques and keeps on developing and inspiring its workers for doing more.
“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.”
Tim Leberecht
Dan Cobley: What Physics Taught Me About Marketing, 2010
It won’t surprise anyone that marketing plays a substantial role in brand image. When you are constantly taking efforts to build a strong and irrefutable reputation of your company and suddenly a customer gets an item of poor quality with your logo on it, the image he had before this incident is destroyed. It becomes irrelevant that you had been serving this customer for years and your service deserved the best reviews. Once you failed you must then double your efforts to get positive feedback again. Nobody is insured from misfortune, however, as Dan Cobley claims you have just to find the way to use it in your favor.
“Distribution of brand energy makes you closer to the people. Your brand is dispersed and you can’t fight it, so embrace it and find the way to work with it.”
Dan Cobley
Some of the TED talks for ecommerce entrepreneurs offered may be not that fresh, however, personally I see them as relevant nowadays, too. They can be applied not for e-commerce but for your business life as well.
Stay motivated and find inspiration in what you do.
Get in Touch
Looking for a partner to grow your business? We are the right company to bring your webstore to success.
