- Expanding your market. You've crossed the chasm, you've found your beachhead market,you've been successful in capturing it. Now how do you expand to other niche markets that make up the entire early majority? In many ways, it's very similar to the problem that was confronted by the Alliesin the second world war. So going back to our analogy that war talks about in his book, D-Day 1994, the Allies were successfulin their Normandy landing, and now they needed a plan of action or an order of battle to now liberate the entire western Europe.
- You need a similar strategy to now take your beachhead success and to leverage that to win other niche markets within the early majority. So, a good way to do that is something we call the Bowling Pin strategy. Some people call it alsothe bowling alley. And again, it is based on the fact that the market or the early majority can be divided up into different segments that are very closely aligned, and maybe only differ slightly by the problem that they have and the fact that you can take your existing product and slightly tweak it to solve that problem.
- So they're looking for the similar solution that's tweaked or the same solution. Again, the head pin is that beachhead that you've just won. And why is it so important? Well remember pragmatist buyers want to only by products that other people can recommend to them and stand behind.
- They also typically wanna buy products that are market leaders. So the beachhead gives you the ability to create a set of customers that can create buzz for your solution and create awareness in the follow on pins. And it also gives you the opportunity to establish market leadership that again creates loyalty and awareness to the follow on markets.
- Now, there are a number of different waysthat you can move from pin to pin. One way is to basically add product features to expand. Typically these are small incremental changes to your product. So if you go on the left side of the bowling alley here, you're actually moving within the same segment, but you're addressing different problems for the customer.
- So one good real world example would be MobileIron, which is a private company that focuses on mobile device security. They operate in a category called enterprise mobility management. Their initial beachhead revolved around the fact that Apple devices that people wanted to use within a corporate environment weren't as secure as a Blackberry device.
- So MobileIron came up with the capabilities to make the Apple device as secure. That was their first beachhead. Mobile changes year to year. It's a very dynamic environment. And another trend that this segment was confronted with was that people wanted to use their personal smartphone within their work environment. So, MobileIron came up with the security capabilities that allowed people to actually do that without compromising IT security policies around those devices. And again, as I said, it's a very dynamic environment, so BYOD is even changing. It's not just about smartphones, it's also now about laptops. So, the next thing for MobileIron to add to their platform was support for laptops. And that gave them the ability to penetrate the segment much deeper, because they were able to address different security needs that that segment had. Another way to expand within the bowling alleyis by word of mouth. It's not changing your product, it's just making customers aware of the solution that matches a common problem that they have with other segments.
- So, from the head pin, you go to other segments that are closely connected. And those segments have the same problem we're now through word of mouth campaigns making them aware of a solution for that problem in the form of your product. So another great real world example is Facebook. All of you are familiar probably with Facebook's story. Their head pin was Harvard university. After the success of Harvard, the news about Facebook spread to other colleges. And then, not only through word of mouth but also adding new features and so forth, they expanded to other segments such that now the general public uses Facebook.
- I think I read recently that Facebook now has over or near a billion users. So that's quite a bit of growth, and it all started with the beachhead of Harvard university. Now here's some quick best practices to follow, rules of thumb. When you think about what market segment to next attack, think about the onethat you are better positioned to dominate. And when we think about domination, it's really about market share.
- And I would say the rule of thumb there is that you need to own 40% of the market. Now because it's a niche, that number will be much easier to calculaten because you'll have an idea of the total number of potential buyers within that environment. So again, the goal is 40% of the market. The other thing that you wanna do to speed the movement from pin to pinis to create urgency within the pins to basically make a buy.
