Читать книгу Oversubscribed - Daniel Priestley - Страница 24

The way to being oversubscribed is to achieve an imbalance in which there are more buyers than sellers in your market. There are four drivers of market imbalances where you'll often see more buyers than sellers:

 Innovation – You offer something new and shiny that no one else offers. There's only one seller (you) and a niche of new buyers who want it. There are therefore more buyers than sellers by virtue of the fact there's only one supplier and more people who want it.

 Relationships – You build such a powerful relationship with buyers that they ignore other sellers. There are more buyers than sellers because buyers aren't interested in other sellers.

 Convenience – You are answering the needs of the market with the most frictionless expression of what they want. This is about being in the right place, at the right time, with something that meets consumers' unmet desires. This creates more buyers than sellers because buyers are reluctant to invest time, money and energy finding alternatives.

 Price – This occurs when you're able to create an imbalance based on price. You've invested into an asset that creates an efficiency others don't have. Crucially, you're still able to offer your products at a price that is profitable but that price is lower than other suppliers can achieve.

If you look carefully at large and established markets you'll see that there are often four big players who each occupy one of these market positions. You can see it in hotels, airlines, banks, telecommunications, cars and computers. Essentially, the big brands focus on dominating one of these four market imbalances and let other brands fight for the alternatives.

You'll also notice that each one of these positions makes it hard to compete with the others. You can't be highly innovative and also convenient; it doesn't work because innovation takes time to roll out with consistency. You can't be super cheap and also compete on relationships; it costs money to build relationships. So you'll have to choose one main market position for your business to focus on.

Let's look at each one in more detail to help you determine which will work best for you.