Essential Drucker Chapter11: The new venture - The need for market focus
The new venture often successes
- in a market other than it was originally intended to serve.
- with products or services not quite those with it had set out.
- bought by customers it didn’t think of when it started.
- used for purposes besides the ones for which the products first designed.
Cases:
- Novocain
- IBM
- Bicycle with engine
One can’t do market research for something genuinely new.
The new venture needs to
- start out with the assumption that its product/service may find customers in market no one thought of.
- systematically hunt out both the unexpected success and the unexpected failure.
- go out and look at it carefully and as a distinct opportunity.
- build in systematic practice to remind itself that a product or a service is defined by the customer, not by the producer.
- work continually on challenging itself in respect to the utility and value that its products or services contribute to customers.
- accept elementary axiom of marketing:Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.
Do not “know better” than the customer
- what the product or service is or should be
- how it should be bought
- what it should be used for
