Launching a Product - How do I create a market rather than enter one?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and today I want to talk about how to create a market rather than enter one. I've talked about marketing and, and kind of the process before and how launching and, and creating a market can be a little bit of a hurdle and most people just try to enter one. However, there are times when you need to create a market rather than just enter one that already really exists in a nice little neat box that everybody can define very easily and say, oh, Market X, and everybody knows what they're talking about. And today I want to talk about, you know, ways that you can do that. Technological breakthrough, underserved or ignored demographics, new product categories, and combining categories and industries and demographics. Well, those are a few ways that you can actually create a market rather than enter one, and we're going to go a little bit deeper in those. So first, technological breakthrough. This one is a pretty Pretty cut and dried one in terms of easy to understand. It's creating a new market that didn't exist before. And the reason you know that is that you create it and the market that was there before still exists. And there's always a little bit of bleed over between 2 markets. You know, when we transitioned from horse and buggy to Gas cars, they coexisted for a while, and so it kind of was the same market, but at the same time it wasn't because people were buying the, you know, a car rather than a horse and buggy. Same with releasing smartphones. They kind of existed, but nobody had that exact device. Nobody, you know, it didn't exist in the same exact way that it had Or something like Walkman coming out as a portable tape player. It's not that we didn't have something that played music before, but something that was portable and played tapes and something that you could take with you, that was new. And so when you make those technology breakthroughs, you're able to create a market that wasn't there before. You know, before headphones ever existed, we didn't have those. We just listened to, you know, a record player or something like that. So those breakthroughs allow you to create a new market, and it doesn't always— it doesn't always have to be huge. It doesn't have to be, you know, changing— if someone were to like invent a working teleporter right now, right, right this minute, comes out tomorrow morning after you watch this, And, you know, that would be a huge breakthrough. That would be some— something that didn't exist before and would create possibilities that had never existed before. It would, however, be competing against cars and trains and planes and any other kind of transportation that's out there. So it's— while breakthrough and it is creating a new market, it still is— does have competition. Second, I want to talk about underserved or ignored demographics. So any market, any group of people, any demographics of any kind that are ignored by current service providers and products is a way for you to create a new market. Now, it doesn't mean that it's new as in didn't exist before, but it is untapped. And when you do that, when you find people and and areas that are not being taken care of, that are not being offered products that you are wanting to offer, you're gonna be in a place where there's very little competition and you're going to be able to make a bigger difference more quickly than trying to enter a more saturated market. So this can be really good for pretty much any product and any service. And usually the trick is somebody has already looked at it and thought it wasn't worth it. And you can figure out— if you can figure out how to make your product or service work in that demographics, then you'll be able to achieve that and not have any competition for a while, typically. So if you want to create a new market, you can also be looking for underserved and ignored sections of the market. The third thing that I want to talk about is new product category. So this is, you know, where someone like Toyota invents the minivan. Nobody had done a minivan before. Nobody had created a vehicle shaped like it. And it's something where you create a— you create something that is based off of something else. So take SUVs, who had big Suburbans or big vehicles, big vans, and you shrink them down, make them a minivan, and into a category. That category didn't exist. Vans existed. SUVs technically didn't exist quite at that time, really. The crossover market didn't exist. So a lot of those categories didn't exist. But each time one of those has been created, we started off with Model T in America, and we've, we've expanded from there. It creates a new segment. So it's not a complete new market because it is usually competing against one or more, and it's not a technological breakthrough typically. It's not even necessarily somebody that's underserved or ignored in terms of demographics. It's creating a new segment. that says, hey, this is a little bit different. This is a product that fits a different way. It solves different problems, sometimes problems that nobody even knew that existed, uh, really consciously. And so that's a way to break into and create a little bit of a market space for yourself, is creating a new product category, making your own way of doing something that is different enough that you get to claim it and people will see it. And obviously people will copy you. You know, most companies that make automobiles at this point, at least in the US, has a minivan of some kind. Everybody has a crossover. You know, those, those are things that didn't always exist in terms of vehicles. And so that's something to keep in mind as a way to create a market. The last one is a little bit different in that it's combining. So Rather than trying to niche too far down and really be too specific, which that is relative, you know, some things work really well when very specific, but actually combining and creating a way to have a market that fuses 2 segments that were typically not put together and looking at what, where do they cross and what do those products and services look like? And when you do that, you can end up creating, your own market, so to speak. And sometimes it's a little bit more of a niche product, sometimes it's less. So you might end up, you know, instead of running, just running in general, you have long-distance running and you have something that's combining multiples. So say you have 2 different sports, you create a product that works in both of those sports. You know, maybe you have one that is— somebody makes one specific to one sport. You have somebody that makes running shoes, but you have somebody that makes, you know, track shoes or something else, and you end up combining and say, well, our product actually works perfectly for both of these. We're not even a shoe, we're a special kind of sock. It's like a shoe, but you don't need a shoe, you wear these and you're— it works for both. I don't know, I'm just making up stuff here, but you're combining different things. into a market that didn't exist technically before by combining markets. And a lot of times that's, that's probably the least— I mentioned it here because that's the least used, least likely to be successful, uh, just because your marketing is going to be a little bit more diluted because you're trying to attract multiple segments at once. Uh, Rather than trying to focus on one really well. Hope this gives you some ideas on how to create a market rather than enter one. Hey, thanks for watching. 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