If you've ever worked in an organization or on a team that got caught up in
the quest to create a new market you know that the experience is all consuming and exhilarating.
While the all-new pure white-space scenario is elusive, a fair number of organizations leverage their deep knowledge of a specific segment, a group of customers or a set of customer challenges to create new offerings that don't fit traditional market definitions or boundaries. The combination of blazing a new trail and believing that what you have created and what you are espousing will help reshape and transform for the better how something gets done is intoxicating.
I met the other day with a CEO living through this very situation right now, and from listening to her very real challenges and reflecting on my own experiences on one of these market-creating odysseys, I offer a number of leadership and management suggestions that might prove helpful on your own journey of market creation.
7 Issues that Should Keep You Awake at Night on Your Way to Creating a Market:
1. You have to surround yourself with flexible, free-thinking and adaptable people. Hiring the former BIG CO executive who hasn't lived through what it means to swim without a life raft may not be the best plan in the early phases. You don't have time to wean people off of big company practices...bring in the professionals that have already been through this process somewhere else.
2. Listen to yourself and your people talk and read your own propaganda. If everything that comes out of your mouth is about how great your new product is at the feature/function/capability level, you've got a problem. If the answer to every business question is something about the unique capabilities and elegant architecture of your revolutionary product, you've got a problem. If your web site is nothing but more of the above, the problem is real.
The prospective clients that you are seeking as early adopters are motivated by a bigger vision, not by the elegance of your technology.3. Markets don't emerge on anyone's schedule. If you are banking on going from nowhere to critical mass on a short-horizon, you and your investors are likely to be disappointed. While everyone in awhile markets emerge at remarkable speed, most of them take years and often never emerge. If your market's emergence is dependent upon people and institutions changing long-standing practices and overcoming deeply embedded approaches, you better be planning for a marathon, not a sprint.
4. Back to the message coming from you and your web site. Like it or not, you are evangelist and educator all at the same time. If all you do is shout product, you will not appeal to either the hearts or brains of your prospective customers. Make sure that your people, your web content and the preponderance of your conversation is educational and informative and not pure product propaganda.
5. Traditional marketing tactics don't work when you are creating a market. Give it up and shoot your marketing head if he/she is suggesting advertising, trade shows and direct mail as primary vehicles. (OK, this one will generate some controversy. Sorry, I believe that the world has changed and people gather their information and assign trust in very different ways than they used to. Before flaming me on this topic, read
David Meerman Scott's: The New Rules of Marketing and P.R. and then let's start the debate.)
6. Traditional selling tactics don't work when you are creating a market. See also the marketing comment above. Transactional salespeople and sales approaches need not apply. Your early focus is on market visionaries willing to take a risk to realize something profound for their business. Match the value creation resource with the task to fuel the vision.
7. Map the Influencers and figure out how to appeal to their fundamental need. Don't know what that is. It's simple. Market influencers gain influence by having radical opinions on what's right, what's wrong and what organizations need to do about what's right and what's wrong. Paint your vision for them, encourage them to develop their own vision and provide them with a soapbox to tell the world. A good influencer will never back you or your product overtly, but if they see the opportunity to enhance their position by grabbing on to the issues that you are dealing with, they help educate the market. This type of influence is not purchased with a subscription to an analyst firm or via press releases, it is gained through personal relationships and involving the right individuals in your strategic market and client discussions.
The bottom-line for now:
The above 7-suggestions barely scratch the surface of what it takes to succeed in helping an organization create, define and profit from a new market. However, they are important issues that I often do not hear the leaders of these exciting firms thinking and talking about. Creating a market is a non-routine project, and as a result, non-routine thinking is required every step of the way. Leave the traditional tactics at home, spend some time thinking beyond the moment and trust your gut that this is really challenging. Remember, if you are right, you want to harvest what you spent so much time, money and gray matter pioneering. If not you, the companies right behind you will be happy to benefit from your efforts.
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