The Dirk Tietjen Blog - Let Dirk lead you in the right direction with his free marketing tips

The traditional way of having success in any industry with an invention was  always kind of guessing what the customer wants. Or maybe it was such a revolutionary tool based on the needs of society that the inventor or enterprise people could be pretty sure to succeed (the birth controll pill may serve as an example).

And though it seems that in most cases all brilliant idea were rewarded by the buying prospects we have to admit the fact that we don`t know about the countless failures on the path of shattered dreams.

So the possible reward for every entrepreneur and innovative founder to get rich was always in good company with the chance to be a total failure with all the ridicule. Well, that`s life – we might hear ourselves say.

But what about today?

Even nowadays we still hear about those ”crazy” inventors who take all the risk and endanger all of their assets and in many cases the assets of their families, too. And even today we hear about success stories as here close to my city an entrepreneur was getting tired of sorting his socks for hours after having washed them.

He simply invented a clip to keep the socks together in the washing machine and even gave them different colors. Looks neat. Was a big success. Brilliant. But there was risk for him, too.

So how does the story sound if the entrepreneur is not as happy with the ending as in the sock clip story. It is something like this:

 1.You have a “brilliant” idea for a product, that everyone on the entire planed will buy.

2. You develop your idea and figure out details of the product.

3. You look for a company or factory able to to manufacture the product.

4. You have a bank financing this great product. 

5. You have the products produced or ordered.

6. You do an expensive  marketing campaign with sales letters and negotiations.

7. Your expectations of sales are not even close to the reality.

8. You get problems paying your credit rates and have to offer the product with bargain.

9. The inventory cost pressures you so you start thinking about giving the stored products away.

10. The financing bank panics and cancels the loan with sudden pay back obligation for you…

I think I don`t have to explain the remaining steps…you got the idea:-).  

So what does it tell us?

David Ogilvy is quoted with the following statement: “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”

I worked for many years for an issuing house for closed end funds, financing ships and hotels. Many years it went well but lately with the crisis some problems emerged. But many of these companies went on in the crisis with an attitude “we know what the customer and the market needs” and kept structuring the same products which sold excellent before. But the problem is, because of the crisis the people changed….they wanted different products, something else with less risk.

So we can learn out of this that we should never try to launch a product with an attitude like illustrated above.

If  we think a product or idea is great it doesn`t mean the market and the customer thinks the same. So before we do an expensive product launch we should find out what the customer thinks.

In these times with high speed internet connections finding out what the customer thinks has become easier than ever before in history. We can split test two different alternatives of products or headlines with pay per click campaigns  and find out which is one finds more customer interest by counting clicks. The same works with email- marketing or banners. 

Even if we dont have the  product ready while we are testing for 5-10 days, we can still  explain potential customers that we are building a ”list of interest” and will contact them as soon as the product is manufactured.

So instead of investing  thousands of dollars in manufacturing costs based on our hope that the customer discovers the greatness of our product we can find out about their needs and wishes right away as a cheap possibility to test market needs. At the same time we even growe our customer list. 

Ok, in case you invented  Mr. Spock`s “Beamer” of Startrek it might be a different story. But even then testing can`t hurt:-).

2 your learning success, Dirk

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