Creating a Market
Volume 12, Number 36
Issue 583
I write a lot about target marketing and the fact that you have to be the right person with the right product at the right place at the right time. I strongly believe, probably because I am an optimist, that honest, ethical businesspeople can always set a unique standard in their target market area by delivering their product with exemplarily passion and enthusiasm. After setting that new unique standard in your target market area, your former competitors will be turned into rivals that will never quite be able to catch up with you. It’s those two things—passion and enthusiasm—that are the true product, and they make the actual end product into merely a by-product as long as it meets the acceptable industry standard.
If a businessperson focuses their mentality on the fact that the most “under delivered” product in the marketplace is passion and enthusiasm and that those two things are always the principal products, I feel that much success can be garnered from a thirsty target market segment. In a way, as long as you are an expert in what you do and meet or exceed minimum industry standards, the actual product is the by-product; it’s the passion and enthusiasm that people really want to buy.
In a way, it doesn’t matter what you sell—as long as it exceeds the customary standard in the marketplace—as long as you deliver it with unbridled passion and enthusiasm. It won’t be the fact that you are an average plumber or electrician that will make you rich, it will be the fact that you are an average one who was zealous about delivering an average level of service with immense passion and enthusiasm.
When Cynthia and I go out into the marketplace, we often are amused by the fact that at least 90% of businesspeople generally do a really bad job delivering their product with that aforementioned passion and enthusiasm. I guess as a consumer that I would translate the desire to have passion and enthusiasm into the fact that I like to be appreciated and respected by someone who is at least mildly interested that they are lucky enough to have me as a customer. I always like to learn something and I like the people who serve me to be happy. As long as some of these things come our way and the item or service we are consuming is being delivered in accordance within general marketplace standards, we will always enjoy spending our money.
We often find paradoxes in the marketplace that challenge our principles: We are amused that certain big box retailers push the necessity of high-priced service contracts at the point of sale. Does this mean that the products that we have just paid are inferior? It’s too bad that a dependable product can’t just be made in the first place. Has the seller of inferior products decided to create a new market by selling warranties?
I’m always amused at the fact that software and computers are upgraded or changed as soon as I buy them. I guess that the market opportunity for poorly performing products is to sell upgrades.
An attorney that I have been working with recently—not my normal group of great attorneys at the Saunders, Cary and Patterson Law Firm (they, regretfully, had a conflict of interest)—keeps charging me and billing me for continuing to overcomplicate a simple matter that they complicated in the first place. I try to model my own firm’s billing for corrective work around a “cost: benefit” scenario and way of thinking.“ Could I have reasonably foreseen these circumstances and did I cause them?” If I did, the charges should be “on the house?” Sometimes, service-providers create new markets by correcting things that should have been done the first time or by cross-selling through fear.
Funny how my chimney always needs to be lined or capped and that the simple annual cleaning is never enough. Now with video cameras that go up the flue, I can see how horrible and nasty it is. I dread the chimney cleaner as much as the dentist because things always happen that prey on my emotions.
Whenever I buy one product and try to interject my own passion and enthusiasm in hopes that the seller will become inspired, I always seem to set myself up for buying things that I didn’t even know I needed. My tree trimmers always seem to notice things I didn’t and somehow the price on the additional work is more (proportionately) than for the first work. One of my painters always seems to find more woodwork that needs to be repaired and that work is proportionately out of line with his painting charges. My exterminator always seems to be finding a new bug about which to instill fear. My cellular telephone provider always seems to want me to sign a new contract to get a better phone or to be able to roam more.
The worst and most unethical service providers sell their variety of services al-a-carte based on worry and emotion delivered in a way that isn’t passionate. That’s a big trap for consumers in the marketplace.
The best service providers deliver a one-stop all-inclusive solution that isn’t based on petty add-ons and they do it in a way that is fun.
The industry leaders deliver that some one-stop, complete solution without being petty about additional minor problems that might crop-up during the transaction. After all, if I hire a professional to serve me, they’re the experts and they should have visibility and foresight to take responsibility for things that can go wrong. These industry leaders are also happy about entrepreneurialism and the feel that they serve in a fiduciary capacity to society
It’s all about FINDING the right person with the right product at the right place at the right time—I just like the ones that are easy to find (and happy that I found them) because I’ll be exuberant that I did.
David B. Robinson, CPA
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