If a smart scientist found a way to make teleportation work, how would you market it?

Launch a teleportation machine –

Clarifying questions:

1. Does the teleport machine teleport animals of all sorts? – Yes
2. Does the teleport machine teleport non-living items? – Yes
3. Does it have any distance margin for teleporting items? – No
4. Can it teleport items to any place? Say outer space? – Yes

Goal:

1. The primary goal of the product is to increase revenue
2. The secondary goal of the product is to increase customer acquisition

Users:

1. Working professionals
2. Business professionals
3. Scientist
4. Elderly people
5. Education professionals

Considering the scope of revenue first and user acquisition second, I would like to go ahead with Business professionals and Education professionals as primary users of the product as they seem to be using the product quite often considering their business use cases.

Perhaps I would like to have the preliminary launch in Bengaluru as there are a lot of business professionals and scientists due to the presence of organisation like ISRO and other organisations working on space problems.

The launch program will be done in three phases:

Pre-launch –

• Since it is a science-oriented product, organising a press conference to be done.
• Collab with news channels/ apps to create a buzz around
• Connect with the top tech bloggers, who can create a proper content around the product.
• Building the list of emails of top scientists and businessmen in order to share the content of the new product.
• Create a website showing the product and it’s pros explaining the use cases. Also, share the timeline of the launch.
• Launch a campaign to get more users signup to experience the demo product

Launch –

• Prepare for a demo to the clients.
• Organise tech events to showcase the working of the product to the users.
• Collab with a distribution channel for the distribution of the product
• Let the video tech bloggers speak about the product. Collab with them.
• Invite the signed up users to get an experience of the product and they can help in word of mouth marketing

Post-launch –

• Keep track of the metrics such as # of product sold, # of sign ups, professions of the users who signed up

Clarifying Questions
1. What does this teleporter do?
2. How many people it can carry?
3. Is it fully tested or it’s just an early prototype?
4. What are the limitations of the teleporter?

Assuming it’s a legit teleporter which can carry few people in it etc… then focus on

1. Company/Product: What are the strengths of the company, reputation and what are the capabilities or the product and it’s unique value proposition?

2. Customer: Identify the target customers. Since it’s early days, this teleporter could be for people hard press for time and willing to spend money. It can also be used by emergency services.

3. Competition: Understand the competition. Maybe there is no competition.

4. Climate: What are the govt. regulations around it? Is something like this approved or due to security or safety reasons it’s not approved. Does govt. regulations prohibits it to be sold in other parts of the world.

5. Marketing: Could be by invitation to high net worth individuals. Create buzz around it and make it a highly desirable product. Another angle could be paid joyride in it. That way you can make it popular in controlled environment.

This is an interesting question. There are a lot of things to consider here:

What kind of teleportation device is it? Is there a distance limit? Can it teleport humans or could it teleport things only? We want to define the product and it’s uses so this is fairly important to answer.

I’m going to assume this product can teleport a person maybe across all distances but requires a “device” on both ends. So very similar to a Star Trek teleportation device. So this product is meant to save time in travel times maybe between airports and distances. In this sense, this teleportation device will mainly be purchased by companies that would operate these services as we may still want to enforce laws on cross border travel. Very rich people can still purchase this item, but legally they can only teleport within the country. Also, you can teleport up to five people at a time and travel time would be instantaneous. While you can teleport items as well, I am going to focus on teleportation as it relates to humans traveling great distances.

The price of the teleportation device will be compared to traveling through conventional means like a plane and the time saved. Because there are no real competitors on the market, we can upsell it and focus on a core group of more wealthy users before we bring it downmarket to the common masses. For upmarket sales, a first class ticket, or a private plane ride can get upwards of $10,000 per trip. This helps subsidize the investment in planes and in gas costs. If we say that everyday, there are 1000 people willing to spend on average $5,000 per trip, and with the time savings, we can upsell it to $20,000 per trip than the teleporter can make upwards of $20 million a day or $7.3 billion a year industry. I will also assume that maybe you have to take a 75% haircut because of interest and costs and that a company will look to pay down their costs within 5 years and that there are 20 companies that are interested in this system, than we can price the teleporter at $7.3*.75*5*1/20 or about ~1.5 billion per dual devices. (depending on the actual costs to manufacture the system). There are a lot of other considerations too like within country travels, this is just a pure estimation exercise.

Because this is a new and exciting invention, it should be fairly simple to promote through social media, through news reports. Every legitimate news organization will be at your doorstep looking to understand how the product works. I don’t think you really need to market it actively until the product has competitors. Perhaps, have a conference where the product is demo’d and make sure that the company is focused on safety and regulatory approval with governments around the world.

The place I would market this product is most likely through a website. Since I imagine most purchasers would be B2B and some of the most richest people in the world, it doesn’t make sense to have a store front. I would focus my energies on having a customer team and a sales team that can field these calls. Perhaps have some demos and most aviary trade shows. I woudl also have a team that can help people understand how to integrate this system into their airport or smaller business.

In summary, I would organically market this product. Being a new invention, marketing through news channels would be the best bet in getting the word out. I would price it high initially because most of the customers would probably be big airports, smaller aviation facilities, and probably the top 1%. I would sell all my products in a bespoke way with a full consulting team that will go to your facility to figure out how to integrate the system directly. I would also focus on having positive PR and gain regulatory approval from the government.