Your solution has no value without the market that needs it. A great product or service is worthless if it doesn’t get into the hands of the market it was designed for. Your market really matters.
Your market matters
Your primary duty in business is to sell your solution to your target market. If nobody is buying your offering (product or service), you will fail in business faster than any other reason. Your market is your business, and your business is your market.
It’s vital to carefully study your industry to understand your total addressable market before you step in. The first thing you must consider before taking your product or service to the marketplace is knowing what the market wants.
There is no way you can create a solution that the market loves when you are blinded to its desires, feelings, emotions, fears, passion, wants, and needs. It’s the market that determines the validity of your business. Who buys your product is as important as your product or service.
There is a market in desperate need of your solution, and you need to find it. So, what are the things to look out for before you choose you market?
1. Is there a demand that needs your supply?
Let me begin with this story about a marketing professor who asked his students, ‘If you were going to open a hotdog stand, and you could only have one advantage over your competitors . . . which would it be . . .?’
‘Location! …Quality! …Low prices! …Best taste!’ The students kept going until eventually they had run out of answers.
They looked at each other waiting for the professor to speak. The room finally fell quiet. The professor smiled and replied, ‘A starving crowd.’
You could have the worst hot dogs, terrible prices, and be in a terrible location, but if you’re the only hot dog stand in town and the local college football game breaks out, you’re going to sell out. That’s the value of a starving crowd (and demand).
At the end of the day, if there is a ton of demand for your product or service, you can be mediocre at business, have a terrible offer, and cannot persuade people, and you can still make money.
The law of demand and supply best summarises what happens in the marketplace anywhere in the world. The market demand is a sign that market need exists, and the simplest way to create demand is to look at what needs fixing, changing, or solving. Put in another way, anywhere there is a demand, there’s a supply need, and an army of a starving crowd waiting.
To sell anything, you need demand. Mind you, you can’t just create demand and then provide a supply. If you don’t have a ready demand for your offer, you have no market. Period. After all, you don’t actually want to be selling ice to Eskimos. Where there is no demand, there is no market.
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