Seven Suggestions to Consider When Creating A New Market
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.
Why Strategy is the Leader’s Most Potent Tool
As a leader, imagine having a metaphorical tool at your beck and call that was capable of catalyzing action, focusing the collective energies of your team members and providing a greater sense of purpose to everyone around you. This tool is strategy and all too often and for varying reasons, this tool is left idle in the bottom of the leadership toolbox, brought out only for special occasions like the annual off site or in preparation for budgeting. The best tool misapplied is no better than a crude implement. Unfortunately, strategy as a leadership tool is widely misunderstood and rarely or poorly applied.
Coping Strategies for the Project Manager Facing an Executive Mandate on Schedule
One of the most common challenges for Project Managers and Engineering teams in new product development organizations is balancing the executive "time to market" mandate with good project estimation and risk analysis techniques. Many a project has misfired after a CEO or top management group has boldly proclaimed to corporate stakeholders that, "Product X will be to market by (insert your aggressive date here).
Want to Change? Manage Strategy in Bursts!
Traditional strategic planning approaches often fail to deliver the results that firms require to jump start growth or pull out of a sustained decline. Legacy approaches emphasize a periodic focus on strategy—often an annual refresh against a long-range plan. This “strategy as an event” approach is increasingly obsolete in a world that changes overnight, with markets being born, maturing and dying at hyper-speed. Instead, what is needed is a more dynamic means for professionals to experiment, innovate and to assess results and refine activities in near-real time.
Organizations that learn to work in “Strategy Bursts” are able to learn, adapt and refine their strategic activities faster than more plodding competitors, but this new style requires learning and internalizing a new approach to strategy management and execution. For many leaders and executives, succeeding with this new model requires letting go of old strategy habits and biases.
Leader-It’s Time to Act on That Poor Performer
One of the most common mistakes of leaders of all experience levels is failing to act in a timely manner on poor performers. This is certainly consistent with our firm’s findings in interviews and surveys over the past two years, where the winner for number one self-described weakness was delivering constructive feedback. (Choose your label: constructive feedback=the tough performance discussion, robust dialog or candid conversation.)
Apparently, many of us are wired with a naive sense of optimism and a willingness to continue throwing good time and money after bad in the never-ending hope that the poor performer will see the light, make adjustments and turn things around. And it does happen. Rarely. In fact, so infrequently, that in my opinion, the leader is better served operating with the parable of the scorpion and the frog in mind. In case you don’t recall, the scorpion convinces the frog that he has changed and should the frog kindly agree to transporting the scorpion across the pond, the scorpion promises not to sting him. Needless to say, they don’t make it across the pond. With their last gasps, the frog asks why and the scorpion responds with, "It’s my nature."
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