Unique market definition tool

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Question - Is there only one standard way to define a market?

Answer - No, each competitor can define their market in unique ways to reflect their unique competencies. Indeed, much of business success is attributed to re-defining a market so as to provide a unique vision and a unique advantage

Key points

Strategically defining your market is one of the hardest things you can attempt to do in marketing terms.

Teams have been known to take days to do this in workshops, and weeks and months, even years, otherwise.

And yet it is also one of the most important strategic tasks that you face. Whether you like it or not, you are always working within a market definition. It may be extremely broad, like "everyone who will buy our stuff", in which case it lacks, dare we say, a certain focus. Or it may be sub-optimal, if you are ignoring some very attractive opportunities.

In more detail....

How you define your market strategically drives some critical areas of focus:

1. the customers and prospects you seek to serve
2. how you serve those customers
3. the competencies and capabilities you rely on
4. the competencies and capabilities you seek to develop
5. the competitors whose activities you track and respond to

So, at its worst, if you mis-define your target market(s), you:

• focus on prospects who are unlikely to buy from you

• miss big "white space" opportunities that are just sitting there waiting for you to address them

• fail to leverage the skills, competencies and capabilities that you have

• develop the wrong skills, competencies & capabilities for the future

• fail to recognise "blue oceans" where you are (or could be), in effect, the only player

• over or under respond to competitive activities, e.g. increase or reduce your prices inappropriately

This tool is designed to help you define your market opportunities around your desires and your unique competencies and capabilities. You are, thereby, in effect, defining your market to play to your strengths. This enables you to focus where you are most likely to succeed and, from experience, we can tell you that this can lead to a significant improvement in business performance. The exercise also delivers some other useful insights:

1. you will clarify and distill your essential competencies and capabilities, leading to better training, recruitment and partnering programmes

2. you will find that people you thought were competitors are not, and those you have never considered to be competitors are, in fact, major ones, leading to a wealth of new "creative stealing" possibilities

3. you will identify new opportunities - "white spaces" - you can target

4. you will identify market segments which you are uniquely capable of serving - "blue oceans" - competitive-free zones

The tool works by getting you to be clear about your competencies and capabilities. Then, by looking sequentially at the combinations of those competencies etc., you can see what sort of competition you have (both generically and by name), and where you do not have any competition at all. By identifying your most significant competitors (based on their ability to compete with your core competencies etc.), you can define the true market you are serving.

To buy this tool, click here.

© 2008, Mud Valley ™ brand marketing community.

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