rational twitter marketing

The best business deal is one that has never been made before, and the healthiest businesses don’t necessarily compete, but rather innovate to pioneer and own a brand new niche.  Here is where technical innovation and creative market strategy intertwine: the best markets are the ones that haven’t yet been defined.

Just like that fanciful folk etymology about a certain Chinese character, inventing your market happens at the powerful Intersection of Crisis and Opportunity. 

If you have an awesome idea for a nifty widget, but you don’t know who would want it, you have a Crisis of having invested resources that marketing may or may not be able to solve.  And if you identify a novel group of people with unaddressed passion or pain, that’s the very definition of a market Opportunity, but one for which you may or may not be in a good position to innovate.

Your destiny as a potent force for Awesome starts with identifying this Intersection — the place where your expertise matches an audience that you can confidently interact with — and then choosing the Right Path leading to successful innovation — the place where your business stands uniquely apart from all others.  For a little while, at least.

So how do you invent a market, and what is the value in doing so?

Most businesses are competing for customers using very similar products or services, meaning that customers can only differentiate on a tangible like price or an intangible marketing asset such as brand loyalty.   Did you get into your business in order to become a supply chain optimizer and/or to spend 70% of your yearly budget on advertising to drill holes into viewers’ brains during the SuperBowl?  Those are the destinies for organizations that insist on direct competition.

How can there be new markets that haven’t yet been defined?

Simple: Most companies don’t quite get it, and are still competing for the ever-more-mythical "mass market consumer". 

The blanket Mass Marketing strategy worked well in an era of relatively low information, where consumers really could only differentiate products based on their labeling; but in the present era of high-information where people are generally so inundated that they use their social networks to filter information out for them, companies face not a homogenous national market, but a hyper-differentiated global market of markets that demand that their specific needs be addressed.  In other words, this is the era of micro-niches.

Do you suppose chocolate makers prior to this century ever imagined that there would be a market for unprocessed cacao beans — the stuff deemed so bitter and caustic as to absolutely require the addition of sugar and usually milk to make palatable — delivered as raw product straight to the consumer?  David Wolfe invented that market.

And the point is not that his company, Sunfood Nutrition, is making $X millions or giving Nestle a run for its money, which it certainly isn’t.  It’s that he managed to find the successful Intersection of his charisma-driven health-motivated marketing entrepreneurship and a certain customer audience of passionate health nuts to put his business in the category of Non-Competition, not to mention converting his own passion into a venture that funds many like-minded employees and keeps some possibly perplexed raw product suppliers very happy.

Finding the Right Path from that intersection towards your business goal does require some ingenuity, but floundering at this point is more likely a result of lack of organized information.  Very few keen innovators exist who simply operate in a realm of pure intuition, like some half-possessed twirling dancer in the music of market ideas, leading effortlessly time after time to brilliant business success.  Pure statisticians, on the other end of the spectrum, do very well at providing models of what has just happened, deriving patterns that make predictions about markets businesses are presently competing within, but aren’t particularly useful in predicting the market success of innovations that don’t exist, in markets that haven’t yet coalesced.

Rather, we see a movement towards honoring the power of the Intersection: those marketers who profess to half-scientist, half-artist mentality employ a clever combination of methodical research and creative interpretation.

So, no, your next awesome market strategy will not come from reading coolbusinessideas.com.  But the good news is that strategic market research that produces interesting results (that which you could act upon meaningfully) need not entail magical powers or a degree in statistics.

And the even better news is that picking a market exploration strategy based around Twitter has much to recommend it.  The short, obtuse explanation of Why: constrain the environment and you reduce your test load.

In blog posts ahead, we’ll be talking about how to sculpt your ideal market and court your ideal audience — focusing on Twitter, of course.  Stay tuned…!