How to Make Safe Predictions about Market Preferences
Making predictions is never an exact science. As you learn more about your market, you increase your understanding of market preferences.
Ask anyone from your market about a particular preference and you could get any answer from completely positive to completely negative. In that sense, you cannot predict a person’s personal preferences.
However, there are advantages to knowing where on the spectrum of opinion most people in your market fall. When you are marketing, you are setting out your stall. You attract some people who are not in your market and possibly repel some who are. The better you are at setting out your stall, the more likely you are to attract the right people.
Once you talk to a prospect, you can fine-tune your appeal and respond to their individual preferences. This depends upon your sales technique. You need to practice it and the only way to do that is to find prospects.
So, the aim of making safe predictions is to find preferences that attract the right people, reducing as far as you can false positives and negatives.
As you grow in understanding your market, you get better at this. The first step is to know what to look for and the issues raised in this question are a starting place. You will find some of what follows more or less relevant to your market. The real challenge is finding issues not listed here that energise your market. How? Be present, spend time with your market with eyes and ears open.
Risk and Security
This is a big issue for financial advisors who have to ask about a saver’s attitude to risk. I wonder how many people lose out because they don’t understand the question? How many people ask to see high-risk opportunities? How many who don’t, miss opportunities they would not otherwise encounter? You see my point here? This is not about finance necessarily.
The issue is the person who steps back from something they perceive as high risk might respond positively if they knew more. So, your marketing challenge is to raise possibilities your market may not have considered, if it is risk averse.
Organisations are often risk averse. Health and safety legislation, for example, aims to keep the organisation safe. There is a lot to commend this approach until it becomes a reason not to act. I’m not saying strategies should risk safety but safety costs need to be included in planning. “It’s worth making these costly improvements because it will mean we can do so much more.”
Quality and Value
Let’s think of this in four quadrants:
- High quality and high value is clearly what everyone wants. This means you are doing the right thing in the right way.
- Low quality and high value. This is likely to be helpful where you are trying something new. We know the thing is worth doing, let’s have a go at it and see what happens. There’s no point in investing in high quality until we know what works!
- High quality, low value. It is easy to do the wrong thing well. But let’s be positive. You’re developing a new approach and want to test it. You don’t know if it works, so perhaps it’s best to test it on something low value to reduce the risk.
- Low quality, low value. For example, a website. If it is low quality, the chances are it will be low value. The problem is you usually don’t know what makes for high quality. The only approach that works is to try stuff, test it and gradually build something high quality and high value. Almost everything starts in this quadrant, so use the principle of imperfect action.
Novelty or Proven
Some people like to be ahead of the crowd, pace setters who are always the first try new technologies or approaches. Others will invest in something that has a proven track record.
This is why new businesses can find it difficult to get established. The people who are willing to try something new are thin on the ground. Breaking through to the bigger established market is hard work.
The technology adoption curve shows how this works in practice. You will see, if you follow the link, moving from early adopters to early maturity is difficult. This is the challenge if you are introducing something new to the market.
On the other hand, the challenge is different if you are marketing some established approach, such as life, personal or business coaching. Here the issue is how to distinguish your business from others, without giving the impression it is something entirely new.
Individual or Mass-Market
Coaches and consultants offer an individual service. Most adopt an approach to coaching they choose so that the package they offer is a proven method. But essentially the service is individual and this is why they are able to charge high fees.
They can offer workshops to groups of people for a lower fee. They may offer the same content but with less personal service.
This distinction holds in any market. Supermarkets get by with little individual service. Most people know what they need and can find it without help. Contrast that with a behind the counter service, where everything is individually found, measured and wrapped.
Mass-production cuts costs and increases choice. Most coaches offer limited options at a high price. If their offer is not right for a prospect, they will refer them on. There are loads of books about coaching for those who do not favour the individual market.
Design or Functionality
This is of course a false dichotomy. If something lacks functionality it lacks design. You would think few people would buy something pretty that doesn’t work!
For example, website design. Many people still think of websites as works of art. They do not understand the functionality a website can offer them. A site that looks good and does not convert is an ornament.
Some sites look dreadful but they convert. Maybe they were slung together without any thought to design and for some reason worked.
On the other hand, think of something like Apple products where design and functionality work together. If you can do that it’s a big advantage. If not, make sure it does what it needs to do.
What other preferences do you find your market has?