Unlocking the Hidden Marketing Gateways

Successful marketing is about planning, execution, and always a bit of luck. Sometimes this luck involves finding a “gateway” that leads to an entirely new area of marketing opportunities that hadn’t been previously explored.

One of the classic marketing case studies is that of Kleenex tissues. In the 1920s women used Kleenex as a means of removing makeup. “Facial tissues” was their positioning, until some bright marketer found that they could also be used by sufferers from the common cold who wanted a disposable material into which they could blow their noses. The company’s growth thereafter was exponential.

There’s also a persistent legend that someone once made a pile of money with two magic words on a piece of paper. The recipient of the piece of paper was the head of the Coca-Cola company and the two words were “bottle it”. True or not, this illustrates the kinds of “hidden gateways” for products that often exist but aren’t always exploited.

These gateways are there for most if not all businesses. They can be new uses for old products or new products to meet an unfilled need. They can be highly lucrative and overlooked by the competition as well, but how can they be identified?

Discover Your Own Gateways

Like the “discovery” of other uses for Kleenex tissues, most of these gateways are well hidden. If they’re discovered at all it’s usually by accident, often as the result of a problem or some other urgent situation that stimulates a flurry of activity. But leaving it up to chance means you may never discover the hidden marketing gateways for your own business.

There is a way to stimulate things by causing your own “flurries of activity” that lead to these discoveries. You might simply use “brainstorming” with your team members, or you might conduct full-scale market research. The most importing aspect is that you are specifically looking for the hidden marketing gateways and not just waiting for them to be uncovered.

The first step in this discovery process is to identify everything your business is now doing. What products or services does it sell? How are these made? How are these delivered? What hours of the day apply to the business? Go through every aspect of what you’re doing now and be as thorough as you possibly can.

Next, identify what your business is not doing. This is harder than it seems at first. For example, you might have surplus manufacturing capacity that’s not being used. You might have the rights to a new product that you’re not manufacturing. If you’re open for eight hours a day then you’re not open for sixteen hours. Great opportunities lie in what you aren’t doing.

Now go through the competition. What are they doing that is more successful than what you’re doing? Are they doing something you’re not? If you’re doing something that your competitors aren’t doing, should you keep doing it? It’s questions like these that lead to surprising and profitable answers.

Go Beyond the Usual

Using this discovery process, a soft-drink manufacturer with a production line that shut down at night found it could very profitably bottle alcoholic cider on a contract basis after its normal working hours. The same thing happened when a manufacturer of cleaning products added a range of household insecticides to their offering by employing surplus production capacity to expand their range.

Another place to look is at successful businesses outside your own industry. Most industries typically contain a number of similar competitors. If you can find an approach or technique that’s working in another business area and can be applied to your own operations it’s highly likely that none of your competitors will be aware of it.

Banks used to be open from 10am to 3pm on weekdays only. It meant inconvenience for their customers but the practice was generally accepted and that’s the way things stayed for years. However, once other businesses began to extend their hours beyond “normal” trading times the banks had to follow suit and found they actually became more profitable as a result.

Banks have continued their process of innovation by becoming early adopters of electronic technologies that have led to the proliferation of ATMs and widespread use of Internet banking facilities.

So, you have a choice to make. You can stay with things as they are and hope some lucky accident happens and propels your business to dizzying heights, or you can start looking around and conduct your own search for those hidden marketing gateways that are out there.

Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.