- How does market type affect market strategy? Remember, the startup has a choice on what market they want to go after and that choice can be made based on risk, reward, or sometimes just a gut feeling. What's your intuition about a market? But getting it right is critical for not only your marketing organization, but also your company.
- It's critical for execution going forward such that you can actually transition from being a start up to a successful company. So how does it, though, affect you as a marketer? It basically comes down to the foundation that you're gonna create when you go out and talk to customers around positioning.
- Remember, positioning answers the basic customer question, what does your company do for me? What value do you bring to the table if I were to talk to you? If you're entering an existing market that has existing competitors, you know that the customers are well-understood, but you have to sort of rise above the noise that your competitors are creating within the market.
- So you have to position your company as both credible so people will take you serious and different so they'll listen. Typically, if you think about being credible, you might promote your founder or your team as a rock star team that has a proven record to make you credible.
- When you think about products in terms of being different, it's typically around better, faster technology, but there are sort of three dimensions that you can look at here. Your product can be better in those respects or you could be buying, creating a better buying experience, and then finally, the third way of maybe succeeding as being something different is to provide better service around your product.
- A great example of somebody that's entered into an existing market and has been successful is Tesla. Obviously, with Elon Musk they have a rock star CEO that has a proven record of being disruptive in multiple industries and providing real solutions that people can utilize. The cars that they are creating are different. They're different in the sense that they're not gas-powered, but yet they can still compete because they are obviously sexy and good-looking, but they also are high performance.
- So really, it was about creating an opportunity to sell against gas-powered cars in a way that wasn't just like your neighbor's Prius. New position marketing really is, again, about entering a new market where competitors don't exist and customers may not even know they have a problem. You need to position your company with vision and passion. Again, education is key because there are a lot of unknowns in this market and the basic unknown is what problem is being solved? So you need to identify from your customers what problem is top of mind for them and show them how you can position your product as a solution to that problem.
- A great real-world example is maybe the early history of the Internet. Before that, it was about Cisco founders going out, talking to IT departments, and IT complaining about the fact that existing technology back in the early 90s, which is difficult to scale and difficult to interoperate with one another. So their idea was to create a new technology that would solve those problems called routers. IT loved it. It just made their life and they could solve all the problems in terms of scale and the ease of interoperability. So what happened was, obviously, the Internet now exists and we all use the Internet so we know how successful that these early disruptors were in a new market.
- The hybrid approach is when you combine the best sort of both worlds. You're going to enter an existing market, but you're gonna carve out a market segment. So this is the re-segmented market positioning. You basically want to provide or show that your company can provide something that customers value and want and need now in an existing market.
- So you know who the customers are, you're just gonna show them a new trick. So this is all about communicating the value of that new trick to the market segment and showing that your innovation is the only innovation that will allow customers to meet that particular problem head-on.
+ A great example here is JetBlue. JetBlue decided to compete within an existing market against established, big competitors like American Airlines and United who had a global footprint and that's what JetBlue saw as their opportunity. The global footprint, if they ignored that and just focused on domestic routes, they could actually lower the cost of providing service to flyers and they then took those low fares and coupled them with a great traveling experience and they were able to compete effectively in the U.S.against the global providers and attract a loyal following.
+ JetBlue is now the fifth biggest carrier in the U.S.so you can see that their method or their approach to re-segmenting a market was successful.So in summary, what are some of the key takeaway points here? Market type will determine how you position your pro
