Who Really Cares? - I've been doing a lot of workshops with inventors and entrepreneurs lately. It's great to see folks huddled around a flipchart applying the business language of category maps, market fishbones, and competitive radar to an early stage idea.
As I work with people using the So what? who cares? why you? tools, I share several tips and techniques to bring the tools to life. Here's a step by step tutorial on the Market Fishbone tool and some advice to help you explore the customer possibilities for your idea.
The Market Fishbone
The market fishbone is a tool to help you explore possibilities – that is, the various customer possibilities that exist for your idea. The key question to answer here is "who cares enough about what I've created to spend money to have it?"
You need to find the pockets or slices of the market that have a real need or burning problem that your idea addresses. When you are in the discovery stages with your idea this is not always clear. Often the first customer we think of for our idea is not the one that offers the best business potential. So you want to explore the possibilities – explore the different sets or clusters of customers and applications for your idea to see what other possibilities might emerge. The market fishbone is a simple tool to help you think creatively about these possibilities.
A classic mistake made by most inventors and entrepreneurs is a failure to focus on pockets or a specific subset of the market when commercializing their idea. Believing the idea has many different uses and applications, they pursue the market on masse. The thinking is that the whole pie is better than the slice, bigger is better, etc. While it's true that you want the whole pie, the way to get it is a slice at a time. Markets are made up of many, many different types of people and organizations, with different motivations, applications for your idea, and of course different stages of readiness to buy. And there are lots of different slices when you begin to explore possibilities. For example, your idea might be a component to a larger solution that gets integrated, it could be a solution to the consumer market, or it could be used by businesses. Each of these possibilities results in a different type of product offering, path to market and company. Therefore, it's wise to investigate the customer possibilities so you can make informed decisions about the customer targets.
Cluster Like Minded People
The art to the market fishbone is to cluster like-minded groups of customers that reference one another for your type of idea. This is known as "self-referencing". It's not as easy as saying doctors, or hotels, or police forces. In most cases, that would not be specific enough - All doctors don't reference all doctors, all hotels don't reference one another, etc. etc. So the key is to find the pockets or "schools of customers" that cluster together and reference one another for your type of idea.
One test to determine this is to consider whether this group would attend the same conferences, symposiums, or other events in their field. This can often be an indicator of a self-referencing group.
Your Market Attack Plan
Often people with new ideas and discoveries develop tunnel vision and see only the possibilities based upon their initial thinking. You don't want to have tunnel-vision when it comes to thinking about who would buy your idea. Often your first instinct about the customer is not the one that results in the best opportunity. So you need to keep an open mind about the customers who "really" care.
There could be many different customer possibilities out there in the market and it's up to you to figure out "who really cares" most today, then tomorrow, and beyond. We call this a market attack plan and that's what you need to develop. Different slices or segments of the market will have different product requirements and priorities, purchasing habits, and most important, will adopt your idea at different stages. Getting the market attack plan nailed down first requires that you think broad about the possibilities. There are other tools that will help you shape your game plan, but for now, let's focus on thinking broad.
Build A Market Fishbone in 5 Steps
1. Draw a BIG fishbone with a backbone and fins shooting off the backbone.
- Note the Market Fishbone to the right. It has space on the tailbone as well as room along the fins to write.
2. Label one of two variables on the backbone of the Fishbone: the special product attributes or the category drivers for your market.
- New Alternative? If your idea is a new alternative to solve a problem, then label the backbone with the unique attributes of your idea. For example, if you had a designed a new type of scalpel for surgeons, you would label the special product attributes of your scalpel as compared to alternative scalpels today.
- Novel Approach? If your idea represents a novel and different approach to solving a problem, or if it solves a problem that until today was not solved, then you should label the backbone with the key drivers in your category. For example, if you had developed a novel approach to addressing the problem of waste disposal in landfills, then you would label the category drivers on the end of your backbone. For more information on categories, visit my web site for details on Category Maps.
3. Think Broad, and then think Deep
- Brainstorm markets first, then segments. Remember markets are made up of many different segments or subsets, each with unique characteristics. Explore the markets that would care most about solving a problem that your idea solves.
- Label these broad markets at the end of each "fin" on the market fishbone. These markets become the anchor for the segments underneath. Markets are a high level view of an industry, such as medical, rail, insurance, computing, or it can be a more horizontal classification such as laboratories, police forces, or manufacturing plants. In the example below, the markets are "medical, mapping, security/intelligence", and the subgroups branching off each of these are the segments inside each market. All of these segments have a problem the backbone drivers' address.
- Be careful to not be too high level in your definition of a market – for example, it's more useful to say the laboratories, than to say healthcare. Experiment to find the best scope.
4. Brainstorm Segments
- Once you have three to five markets labeled, (you can add other fins later as you move along), you should begin the brainstorming process of looking for slices or segments.
- Here's an approach to get the process started:
- Read aloud the backbone variables – this is the anchor to the markets and segments. Ask the question: "Who REALLY cares about these things?"
- Move around on the fishbone plotting sub-groups with titles. Don't worry about catchy titles or phrases, just capture the ideas being shared out loud by the team.
- If you're stuck, try thinking about pockets using these techniques:
- List the customer applications– how would customers use this type of idea
- List the derivatives in each market – brainstorm out loud all the permutations. You can rule out later.
- Talk through some of the segments appearing on the flipchart – they often help people ponder other adjacent pockets/segments.
- Keep in mind, the idea here is to brainstorm as many potential segments as possible – don't evaluate on the fly – just let people go with their ideas. It is not uncommon to have 3-4 different market fishbones filled with segment possibilities. Companies often have up to 60 different segments identified at this stage.
5. Step back periodically and look for clusters and patterns on your Market Fishbone
- Periodically stop and look for patterns – are there subgroups that would be clustered together in to a horizontal segment (i.e. across markets). This would be the example above of laboratories or archives, where they are cross-industry but would reference one another when looking for a product. Circle and cluster these sub-groups with a different color to indicate this.
- Once you are satisfied you can see the best possibilities in front of you, it's time to start clustering and make choices about which pockets look promising for further investigation. There is a lot more detail about how to score these segments in my book. For now, it's necessary to prioritize the segments you see on the flipchart and begin to build agreement among the team about "what stays and what goes!"
- Don't feel pressured to do all of this in one meeting – the best Market Fishbones evolve over several weeks. Start the exercise and then give people time to go away and reflect. Take the flipchart pages and post them on a wall visible to the team – as they pass by, they'll contemplate and even have kitchen conversations about the different segment options. It's this type of dialogue that will bring about the best possible outcome for your market attack plan.
6. Select segment(s) for profiling.
- Depending upon your time and resources, you will want to select several or all of the highest priority segments to shape and mold to meaningful profiles. This is what is called building a Segment Strawman. The strawman examines each of the segments with more precision in terms of their application of your idea, buying habits, current infrastructure to support implementing it, etc.
- This is the next stage to begin uncovering where the best segment opportunities exist for the ROI we discussed at the beginning.
Summary
As you can see, it takes a disciplined approach to arrive at the best customer opportunities for your idea. This is the due diligence necessary to avoid chasing markets and customers who might "like" your idea, but who have no intention of buying from you. Worse, you end up pursuing a customer pocket where there are a couple of customers who will buy but not enough potential to give you the ROI. This is what happens to inventor's who target "early adopters". Early adopters are not a segment or pocket – they are a characteristic of buyers who purchase new ideas.
Get into the habit of exploring customer possibilities for your idea as early in the discovery stage as possible. Don't wait until you've figured out the idea – you'll be at risk of "tunnel vision" and may not see the lush green forest for the trees!
|
The University of Central Florida (UCF) has adopted So what? who cares? why you?™ as its standard commercialization assessment tool. Wendy's book and online knowledge portal, The ToolShed, are being used university-wide to further the goal of positioning UCF as a national leader in entrepreneurship education, research commercialization, and venture creation. So what? who cares? why you? is being used by faculty, students, inventors and entrepreneurs to address the need for commercialization assessment tools as well as a how-to guide for entrepreneurs to self-educate on the essentials involved in venture creation.
