You Ask, I Answer: Marketing and Positioning for Different Industries?

In today's episode, James asks, how is your thought process different from marketing to a well-established market or industry versus a newly discovered market or industry? I guess from a a strategic perspective, you have different problems you're trying to solve. If you recall back to the August 21st edition of the Almost Timely Newsletter, I talked about the pigs framework, right? Problem impact, general solution, specific solution. If you can uh walk through that real quickly, problem, do you understand the problem as the consumer?

Do you have do you know what the problem is? Two, do you understand the impact of the problem if you don't do anything about it? Three, do you understand the general solution to the problem? Four, do you have a specific solution in mind? So if the consumer is hungry, they understand the problem.

What's the impact if they don't solve the problem, they get hangry, right? Uh the general solution is eat something, and the specific solution is find something to eat that meets your your tastes and budget. When you're talking about well-established industries or well-established markets versus newly discovered uh markets or startup markets, um brand new markets, it's a question of where you are on that spectrum. A well-established mature market, everybody or most people in that market pretty much understand the problem. They probably understand the solution, the the the impact and the general solution, right?

So they've got the three out of four pigs of the pigs things settled. They understand the problem, they understand the impact, they understand the general solution. Where they are is they need to figure out a specific solution. So they're going to be looking at uh competitors, they're gonna be looking at you, they're gonna be looking at price, because in a mature market, um, a lot of the times it's a it's a pricing war because that if it's really mature, the solutions in that marketplace kind of become a commodity, right? If you need marketing automation software, there's really not a whole lot new in the marketing automation software space, right?

There's all these major players, there's all these, you know, there's a bunch of startups too, but you know what the problem is, you know what problem you're trying to solve. And so you can narrow down the different vendors um based on budget, price, time to to get up and running, different features that you might need. In a new discovered industry in a new market, um, you may be starting at the very beginning of the pigs process, right? People may not even understand what the problem is, right? If you've got a new left-handed smoke shifter, right, people might not even understand w what the thing is that is you even exist for.

Why are you here? What is what's the point of you? If they don't understand the problem that you say they have, for sure they don't understand the impact. They're not even looking for a solution, and they definitely don't want to hear from you with your specific solution. So, in terms of marketing, you have a lot more education to teach people, hey, this thing that you're we're talking about here is a problem.

It is gonna have an impact. It there is a solution to that problem, and we are the the best solution for that. For example, um prior to October 2020, Google Analytics 4 didn't really exist. It was called Google App Plus Web. And Google had said, you know, this isn't beta, we're we're testing it out and things.

And if I had said, hey, Google Analytics 4 is is the thing, people would have been like, what the heck does that what does that even mean? Right? Why why are we talking about this? Where where did you even find this information? They wouldn't have even understood the problem.

The problem, of course, being that Google's going to be moving the the cheese on all of us. They wouldn't understand the impact. They wouldn't know that the solution was to start migrating and testing and getting your data into the system. And they certainly would not have said, hey, Chris, please come and help, you know, get us set up on this thing. So that pigs framework really helps you understand the maturity of a market.

The more complete the pigs framework is, the more competitive the market is, the less explaining you have to do to people that it's a problem, right? You don't have to explain to people that their their gas car needs an oil change, right? That's a that's a well-established problem. Your car needs an oil change. So your marketing has to be about which of these vendors is better.

There are other things like martial arts. Martial arts is not new, right? It's thousands of years old. But today's audience in today's world may not understand what problem they're trying to solve. The problem probably isn't some guy with a spear trying to kill you.

I mean, it happens, but not often. But the problem might be, hey, I'm, you know, I'm 42 years old and I'm about to die of a heart attack because I sit at a desk for 90 hours a week, or the problem might be I can't seem to stop yelling at everybody I love because I'm under so much stress. And so if you're married, if if someone does, if someone knows that the problem, maybe they they don't understand the impact of the problem, right? No, no, I'm fine, everything's fine, just yelling at everybody I know. Um right, so that's a little further down spectrum.

Maybe they read an article that you create, then saying, Hey, the general solution to not yelling at everybody you know, is to do some kind of physical exercise that also helps focus your mind, and then the specific solution is the martial arts school that you represent. So even in a mature problem space, if the audience is unaware that the problem exists, you may have a lot of educating to do. Use that framework to benchmark where your industry is and where you are and see what the the gap, the delta is between people who understand everything that and they're just trying to find a vendor, all the way to what are you even talking about? One of the things that I always find funny is when you're talking to a company, you're talking to a representative, and you say, Who's your competition? They say, Oh, we don't have any competition.

We we stand alone. When somebody says you don't have they don't have any competition, that tells me that there's not a market for what they do, right? If if there was value in what they did, they would have competition. If there was value in what they did, they would have a lot of competition. Um CRM software is valuable, right?

There's a gazillion vendors in that space. Nobody has to doubt that email marketing is a viable marketing channel, right? Again, a zillion vendors and services. But what about, you know, NFT marketing? Yeah, there's there's some vendors, but there's still not any that are household names just yet.

What about um metaverse vendors? Wow, that got quiet, right? Um, there's not a lot in that space yet. And as a result, that's an indicator that the space isn't mature. Upside, if you can become a player in that space early on, you can gain a dominant lead in it if it matures, if it if it comes to fruition.

If on the other hand it's a no-go, it's a you know a flash in the pan, then you've invested a lot of money and time for for no particular benefit. So again, use the competition as a benchmark for the maturity of a space. If you understand the competition well, you see that there is viable competition for what you do, then you can be pretty sure that someone is going to pay money for it. And then from an education perspective, from a content perspective, you know where you need to be creating content. So really good question.

It's an important question, and it's a tough question to answer. So thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.