I know a lot of us who love business spend time reading the biographies of successful people and case studies of successful organizations. One of the things I’ve noticed is that many times, when successful people reflect on the most happy times or most memorable points in their journeys, they talk about the early days of their business, even if those days produced a lot of struggles.

Here’s an example from a good book about Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page:

It has been a dramatic journey from when Page and Brin celebrated milestones by going to Burger King for hamburgers and when they played roller hockey in the parking lot with employees. Those were the good-old-days. Google has moved on to the good new days and to a time when it has enormous responsibility to the public, to employees, and to shareholders.” – Janet Lowe, Google Speaks: Secrets of the World’s Greatest Billionaire Entrepreneurs, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, pg. 247  

I had the opportunity to have lunch a while back with an entrepreneur who is about to celebrate his first year in business. He leapt onto the entrepreneurial path just out of college.  He had worked the night before until 6 am and had grabbed about 4 hours worth of sleep before we met for lunch. He was bleary-eyed, but he was also kind of proud of himself for staying on task to help find a solution to a difficult problem within the deadline requested by his client. I had to laugh out loud because I remember those days very well in my own business. When you’re at that stage you do pretty much whatever you have to do to please the client and wow them enough that they’ll hire you back and refer you to others. It’s about the simplest but hardest marketing strategy there is. And because it’s YOUR business and you’re serving YOUR clients, it can result in a sense of satisfaction that’s hard to describe.

So if you find yourself up against tough odds and you’re burning both ends of the candle, just consider that these could become the days you’ll reflect upon with great pride in the future. With that in mind, why not go ahead and celebrate these “good-old-days” while they’re happening?

“When I hear somebody sigh, ‘Life is hard,’ I am always tempted to ask, ‘Compared to what?’”— Sydney J. Harris, Journalist

Trick question!

Companies don’t buy anything! Companies don’t browse the web, companies don’t call to praise or complain, companies don’t use your product, companies don’t refer you to other companies, companies don’t buy anything! PEOPLE do these things. Those people may work for companies or organizations, but they’re still human beings with all the human emotions and human wants. Indeed their “job” may involve “purchasing,” and they may be rewarded for making sound purchases, and their purchasing critieria may be heavily influenced by factors directly related to business, but keeping the human emotion out of the decision is impossible because, well, we’re all human.

A frequently discussed marketing topic is whether to categorize purchase types or markets by either “consumer” or “business” or “business to business.” A better idea is to remember that regardless of which categorization you’re tempted to give your organization, the truth is that there’s ultimately a customer, a person who’s buying from you. And the best thing you can do is to get to know as much about the person who is buying from you as you possibly can and to learn as much about their ultimate customer or consumer as you can. Do this and you’ll run circles around your competitors who are short-sighted enough to believe they’re selling to a “business!”

Ignore conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by doing it in exactly the opposite direction.”- Sam Walton

How many categories of competition are there?

Roughly, two! Yes, textbooks talk about brand competition, total budget competition, substitutes, etc., but I prefer to think that there are two basic categories of competition: Direct and Indirect.

Direct competition is anyone who gets up every day with the specific, deliberate goal of taking that business you would otherwise have from the customers your efforts are targeting. Indirect competition is anything your target market could do other than do business with you!

If we are the local cable company, for example, even our monopoly on the market won’t guarantee our success. We have direct competition in the form of network television, satellite television, public television, and so forth. One could consider radio, the Internet, Netflix, and other media forms of competition as well.

There are also less-obvious, more indirect forms of competition that have to be considered when developing strategy. There are other opportunities that compete for the time and resources of the customer such as reading, social events, the climate/weather, tough economic times, superior technology, changes in societal norms/values, or anything else in which the customer could invest his or her resources. Doing nothing or just plain apathy is also a form of competition.

This problem is not unique to for-profit entities. Many very worthy causes don’t get the support they deserve simply because there are other opportunities competing for the resources of their target markets.

This begs the question, “How can we overcome these various forms of competition?” The answer is, once again, the customer! To protect ourselves from direct competitors, we have to make sure our value proposition is superior to theirs. We can accomplish this simply by targeting the best customers to match our core competencies and staying closer to our customers than anyone. Indirect competition may be a little tougher, just because it is rather hard to predict and impossible to control.  Indirect competition is often caused by a lack of interest, so the question we have to answer for our potential customers is, “Why should I care?” If we have a value proposition that truly benefits them and is worthy of their investment of time, money, or whatever, we can then go about telling a story that compels them to shift those resources our way.

This may seem like a simplified view of the competitive landscape, but by keeping the categories narrow we can avoid overlooking anything!

Your competition is anyone who raises customer expectations, because if someone else satisfies customers better than you, no matter what type of business, you suffer by comparison.” - Inside The Magic Kingdom: Seven Keys to Disney’s Success

People often talk about “needing to ‘do’ some marketing,” and they are often perplexed on exactly where to start. This is not surprising considering that if you pick up 10 different books on marketing, entrepreneurship, strategy, or whatever, you may find 10 different approaches. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, by the way, because you’ll find that the best way to get really good at what you do is to study a whole bunch of approaches and pick and choose what you like.

Something I’d urge you to consider is to not get all tied up on knots looking for the “right answer.” Who the heck knows what a “right answer” is in this crazy marketplace? You can bet today’s “right answer” may not be so “right” tomorrow, so why bother? Instead, try to decide what YOU want to accomplish and then look anywhere and everywhere for ideas on how to get there. Be prepared to shrug off a few setbacks along the way and also be prepared to celebrate any and all forward progress as much as you celebrate achieving whatever ultimate success you’re looking for.

All models are wrong; some models are useful.” – George E.P. Box, Statistics Professor

For a market to exist, 3 factors must be met (there is a fourth that some authors like to throw in, but we won’t worry about that here).

There must first be a need or desire for the product. Potential customers must see some inherent value in the offer being made. They have to imagine how this product will somehow benefit them.

The second thing that must be present is the potential customer has to have the  ability to pay for that which we’re offering.

The third is that there has to be a willingness of the potential customer to use their money to pay for that which we’re offering.

So the basic factors that must be present for a market to exist are need or desire for, ability to pay for, and the willingness to pay for, whatever we’re offering. Once we determine that, we get busy telling our value story in the most compelling way using the most effective means of reaching those customers. It’s not easy, but it is that simple.

Fish where the fish are!” - Unknown