SalonScale: Start-Up Customer Relationship Strategies for Niche Market Growth

Alicia Soulier, owner of Capelli Salon Studio, a hair salon in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, has developed an application (app) that can help save hair salons thousands of dollars per month in hair colour costs. However, she is struggling to recruit enough subscribers to her new software as a service (SaaS) company, SalonScale. With the diversion of her attention from her hair salon to the app threatening her core business, Soulier must soon decide on a customer acquisition strategy.

This case can be used at the undergraduate and graduate levels in entrepreneurship or marketing courses to explore the customer relationship funnel in terms of how to attract, retain, and grow value from customers; product configuration through early customer interactions; digital entrepreneurship, social media marketing, and social media influencers; and female entrepreneurship. Students will apply Steve Blank’s customer relationship funnel methodology in their analysis of this case, to learn how entrepreneurs acquire, retain, and grow value from their customers. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will have gained a theoretical and practical understanding of the following:<ul><li>The importance to entrepreneurs of filling and maintaining the customer relationship funnel, and the role of different sales channels.</li><li>The role of co-creation and feedback-based new product development.</li><li>The difficulties of selling to skeptical clients and of scaling based on time-consuming sales efforts.</li><li>The use of digital media and social influencers for reaching customers.</li></ul>

• social media influencers
• digital marketing
• growth
• customer relationship
• start up
• scale up