↓
 
  • Home
  • About SSM
    • Guy Smith – Chief Strategist
    • Vision and Values at Silicon Strategies Marketing
    • Your size company
      • Start-ups – Setting a Good Foundation
      • Mid-sized Companies
      • Enterprises – Aligning Teams and Leading Marketing Initiatives
  • Services
    • Market Research
    • Marketing Strategy Development
    • Marketing Communication and Materials
    • Marketing Operations/Execution
    • Mentoring and Coaching
    • Seminars & Sessions
      • Marketing Strategy Seminars
      • Mentored, One-day Strategy Development for Startups
    • Interim Marketing Executives
  • Clients
    • Selected Silicon Strategies Clients
    • Client Case Studies
      • SuSE/Novell
      • DeviceAnywhere
      • Private Social Networks
      • VA Software
      • Foreign Exchange Translations
      • FundNET
      • Rubric
      • Telamon
  • Contact

  • Technology Marketing
    • Market Definition
    • Market Segmentation
    • Buyer Genotypes/Personae
    • Whole Product Definition
    • Positioning
    • Branding
    • Market Messages
  • White Papers

Post navigation

← Authentically
Suffering Surveys →

Saturation Silliness

Posted on 2012/02/14 by admin2014/04/29

“Our market is mature, and is saturated. We have to steal customers from our competitors.”

There are some absurd technology marketing truisms, chief of which is that anything is so static that a market won’t and cannot be changed. Resting on the notion that there is only one recourse to growing a customer base means certain cerebral sediment has set — that market leaders don’t. When your market is saturated, you should think about changing the market or at very least adapting to changes in and connected to your market.

starbucks_saturationFirst, no market is ever saturated. New companies come to life every day. A start-up limping along on open source and big dreams will be tomorrow’s Twitter and will need products they cannot afford to buy today. Freemium models work well in markets where long-term customer nurturing can be guided and automated. More mature companies occasionally switch technologies tied to yours, and thus create opportunities for you. There’s a customer born every minute (wait, that doesn’t sound good).

Technology users expand their operational base and augment what forms of technology they use. When a competitor’s customer upgrades their DBMS to support virtual storage, do you offer tools that provide value in the clustered environment? If you do and your competitors do not, then their customer has shifted to a new product category in which you provide value. The market may be saturated, but some products are designed to be more equal than others by anticipating changing customer needs.

Business is always evolving, and thus customer needs tied to changing business directions create new customers. Five years ago the concept of private clouds was vague, whereas today it is part of the IT linga franca. Adapting products to meet changing business trends moves a product along to new customers (those leapfrogging in technology implementation) or those who are following trends as they solidify. Same market, same customers, new needs.

Yes, in mature and saturated markets you need to steal customers from competitors. But how you steal them, how you create them, and how to find new ones is possibly more valuable than expensive toe-to-toe sales battles and prying unwilling people from their preferred technology.

Posted in Marketing, Marketing Mistakes, Marketing Strategy, Product Marketing permalink

Post navigation

← Authentically
Suffering Surveys →

Sidebar Area

  • Add Some Widgets!
    This theme has been designed to be used with sidebars. This message will no longer be displayed after you add at least one widget to one of the Sidebar Widget Areas using the Appearance → Widgets control panel.
    You can also change the sidebar layout for this page using theme options.
    Note: If you have added widgets, be sure you've not hidden all sidebars on the Per Page options. You could switch this page to One Column.
  • Log in
Copyright © 2001-2025 Silicon Strategies Marketing — Marketing Consulting | Silicon Valley, Asheville NC
The infamous Facebook Non-Support Saga
↑