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Dear Reader

Business Development is a complex topic. In such case the questions raised are more important than potential answers. Therefore, this blog will focus on presenting questions. There will be answers, full or partial, to be supplamented by links presented when relevant. The answers from my experience will be clearer once the questions are clearer.

While this is not a discussion forum, readers are invited to comment, and the comments will help determine the topics and current issues to be explained in the future.

Enjoy



Friday, July 30, 2010

Which came first Technology or market demand?

Before you rush forward with the answer, or get annoyed, this is more than just a philosophical question. When you start learning marketing or economics you learn about demand and supply, you learn to draw the curves and to fix a price. Of course for marketing, once there is a demand in the market, the rest is a long solved problem on how to respond. So if your answer if that the demand came before the supply, than at least in the classical world of marketing, you know how to proceed.
But, I can hear some of you asking, about those few cases in which the technology preceded the demand, the internet and its environment are such cases, there were many services / products that did not exist before and demand did not exist.
So it would seem that the right answer to the question above would be "YES". While you think about that I would like to mention a small joke that anyone learning marketing in Israel must have heard at one point at least (could be just an Urban legend): in the 1950's a shoe factory in a kibbutz sent two salesmen to Africa one to east Africa and one to the western parts, to assess the marketing potential of the factory. The first evening the first salesman calls the factory and says:"There is nothing here for us, everybody is walking barefoot, I return tomorrow". Before they can get their balance back, the other one calls and says:" start working in three shifts, the market is enormous, everyone here is barefoot". The story as I know it stops here.
The first salesman is the case of missing demand, even if the technology / product exists. It requires educating the market into creating the demand. This can often be lengthy and expensive, and as a result of that - risky.
While the risk may be acceptable to a large firm, for an SME, or a start-up it could be dangerous. The firm may spend its limited resources and die before the market is created, or may create the market just to have a larger firm exploit it.
In Israel where many of the start-ups are technology based, this is a very risky point. There are many firms starting with a wonderful technology, but with little market demand, and what is "obviously a great idea" to the technology people is often not so clear to the customers in the market. These are the great technologies that fail, not due to lack of ideas, or capabilities, but due to better understanding the technology than the market.
If one recalls the High-Tech crisis that occurred when the 3rd generation of communication failed to be accepted by customers, not because it was not good, or not impressive, it was just that the market was not used to such rapid technology changes. It was necessary to make people understand that they wanted / needed the new capabilities before they were ready to make the change.
Great technology is not all - a great market can be.

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