Situation: A company’s CEO is operating in a complex marketplace. Product pricing and consumer acceptance are issues. Consumer education about the product is an important part of the market plan. It may take a couple of years for the market to develop. How do you execute the product and market timing plan?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Important issues are survival while the market develops and maintaining a unique technology advantage.
- As a small player in a busy and rapidly evolving market, a critical element of the strategy will be to rapidly gain the attention of the people that Seth Godin has named the “sneezers” – those who have significant influence on their consumer and business peers and who can quickly help to create the momentum that will drive the company’s market position.
- Examples: give the product to the key influencers at target companies.
- Make it easy or free for the key influencers within your partner organizations to experience, love and spread the word about the product. Allow them to give a few free copies to friends.
- To avoid becoming roadkill, fly under the radar.
- Look for opportunities as they occur in this evolving market. They may come from many players.
- Have a solid strategy in place to execute once an opportunity arises: What do you want to achieve? What is the timeline? How will you measure achievement?
- Have multiple back-ups to the key partners that the company is currently courting.
- Instead of looking for VC funding to fund the next round, why not secure the additional funding from the company’s original backer?
- To earn this the company will have to demonstrate: interesting partnerships, traction in the marketplace, and assurance that an existing major player won’t squash the company.
- A perceived barrier is that the product is not quite ready to deliver the experience that customers will expect.
- What is “not quite ready”? Most successful products are not 100% ready on introduction. Look at Microsoft’s strategy. From their earliest products to the present, new versions are launched when they are 80-90% complete. They then respond quickly with updates based on customer feedback. Many other companies have done the same.
- Historically, first to market has beaten later, more complete entrants.
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