You’ve heard it
plenty of times – find a market with a problem, find their solution, and throw
yourselves in their path so that they throw their money at you. For the most part this is good advice. However, let’s break this down further since
essentially what we are referring to is meeting a customer’s wants and needs.
You see, the problem
is that it’s easy for our ego to get in the way when we start a business. We may know what a customer needs and so we
set off to create that product or service.
Then we are completed befuddled when no one is buying our product.
What happened? We didn’t create a product that people
WANTED.
If you decide to create
a business that meets people’s needs, you better also be sure that these people
want your solution.
For example, let’s
suppose you run into a specific population of smokers. They love gathering on Saturday nights on
their front porches, enjoying good company, their favorite beverage, and a pack
of Marlboro Reds.
The problem is, this
particular group has a history of lung cancer in their families. And due to the long history of smoking each
of these people has, coupled with the large number of cigarettes they smoke
each day, you know they are walking a dangerous path health-wise.
What do these people
NEED? This particular group needs to
quit smoking before they meet their untimely ends. But if you attempt to market a stop-smoking
product to them, you’re the one likely to meet an untimely death. Quite simply, this particular population of
smokers doesn’t want to quit, so you’re wasting your time and money trying to
sell that sort of product to them.
At this point you
have a choice:
1. You can find a
market of smokers who DOES want to stop smoking, and sell them your product.
2. You can figure
out what your “porch smokers” actually want, and sell it to them (discount
cigarettes come to mind).
3. Or you can just choose another market and
product.
You can see this same
sort of example playing out across many different populations, especially in
regards to health. For example, you may
find overweight people who need to lose weight, but they want clothes that make
them look slimmer. Or you may find teenagers
that need a dependable car, but the teenager is more interested in what the car
looks like as opposed to whether it will need costly repairs.
Sometimes the product
you are putting on the market is so revolutionary that people have yet to
realize they need or want it. In that
case, if you decide to proceed you will likely spend a lot of time and money
educating your potential customers. This
is one of those cases where being second into the market may be more
beneficial, since your competitor spent the time and money educating the
market, and now you can swoop in and get your market share.
For example, marketer
John Reese was one of the first people to come out with an autoresponder. People didn’t realize they needed it, and
they for sure didn’t want it. In fact,
they didn’t even know what it was. As
such, John and his closest competitors had to educate the market before he
could sell autoresponders.
Now of course when
you say “autoresponder” most people want it for their business plus they tend to
need it if they’re running a mailing list.
Even though the competition may be tough, at least if you entered that
market now you wouldn’t need to explain to potential customers why they wanted
and needed your autoresponder service.
So what’s the bottom
line? Know your market! No matter who you are marketing to and what
product or service you’re putting out, if you want to succeed make sure your
market wants what you have. Better yet,
make sure your market DESPERATELY wants your product!
