It’s All About The Customer
Still can’t get on with selling our product or advertising what it is we do, as the patent is going to take a month or so to go through. We’re taking the delay as an opportunity to take stock of our plans for moving the business forward, and in particular, who to aim the product at.
In a previous blog I mentioned our initial decision was to target a small number of big companies, with the idea that once larger companies were on board, the smaller trade would be easy. However, we’ve taken advice from someone who used to work at Johnson and Johnson whose overwhelming advice has been that big companies aren’t interested in using someone unknown without a proven track record and customer base.
The really big companies have advertising budgets of millions of pound, which they spend with their advertising agency, specifying whom exactly they want to target and the message. A large proportion of this might be set out to spend online, another chunk might be pushing a new or up and coming product, and another chunk might be spent on reaching new audiences. Any tiny amount of budget left might then be invested carefully with a new company that would be recommended to or researched by them. This doesn’t leave much room for a young company like us to get in there, even if we offered our product for free. The risk of their name being associated with an unproven company such as ourselves and damaging their brand would be too great, if things were to go badly.
We’ve realised we probably need a bit of guidance on this, and so have appointed a marketing manager. We’re going to scale our ideas down in terms of whom we target, and go for large local brands initially. We’re going to trial the service at universities, which will be a good way to grow the product; if it goes well at York University then we might then launch it at Leeds and Hull, then Manchester and Durham and so on. It’s certainly proving to be an organic process!
