Have you ever met a true visionary? They tend to have a crystal clear goal, an unwavering belief in its rightness and an utter commitment to achieving it. The rest of us run our companies with a little less certainty and a lot more openness to new ideas. So what inspired your business vision? And should it change as you grow?

The seed of an idea that germinates into a start-up business tends to be one of two things:

  • A problem, or
  • A solution

Both can work well, but they need different approaches to marketing to succeed. It may seem obvious, but unless you are clear where you are starting from, it’s easy to position yourself wrongly.

A problem-based vision

“I’m sure I can do better”

A problem-based approach often starts from dissatisfaction with a bad experience. I started a company selling school uniform because I disliked the shop I used. Their clothes were expensive and poor quality, and their sales staff were among the rudest I have ever met. But I had no alternative, as the clothes had to have the school logo on them and there was only one supplier. I had zero experience in selling clothes, but I figured it couldn’t be too hard to compete with such a low bar. So I found an online supplier and started small with just fellow parents at my children’s school.

Poor choice, low quality goods, high prices, bad customer experience. All these present endless fodder for fruitless grumbling, but they also open doors for innovative competition. The aim is to turn a nightmare into an opportunity by changing the ground rules.

Problem-based marketing

Companies like these have a ready-made market, but need to judge the size of it carefully to ensure it is worthwhile. For instance, my school uniform business was limited to serving one school (unless I chose to invest in the colours and logos for other schools).

It is also vital to actually solve the problem and to build a marketing strategy to advertise the fact. In my case, the distinction was easy to point out by Christmas, when my customers’ children still had vibrant green sweatshirts while other children’s had faded in the wash. Make sure you highlight the difference your company makes, especially if your competitors are marketing on the same feature but yours is better.

Avoid introducing a new problem

The third vital ingredient is to avoid introducing a new problem while solving the initial one. Over time, this sadly became an issue with my school uniform business. I had no storage premises and couldn’t invest in too much stock, so I worked on an order basis. However, my supplier’s delivery timescales gradually slipped from 2-3 weeks to 6 or more. Instead of being able to purchase a replacement instantly when their little darling tore a hole in their shirt, customers were dependent on my variable stock levels. So they would buy from me in the summer when there was plenty of time before the new term. But they started returning to the original shop when I couldn’t meet urgent requirements.

A solution-based vision

“Look what I’ve made!”

Solution-based approaches start from a bright idea or a leap forward in technology. Lots of technology businesses in particular start this way. They begin as ideas in search of an application, and the best ones find or create their own niche. To the creator, the invention seems amazing. Everyone else may take more convincing. Which isn’t to say that these businesses are a bad idea – they just have to work harder to create a market.

There are plenty of wrong predictions about the durability of new inventions:

“Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”

Darryl Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, 1946

Television has certainly created and captured markets for a lot longer than 6 months! A more recent example is IOT (the Internet of Things, or smart sensors). This technology has been around for 10 years, and seemed to spend at least 5 of those looking for useful applications. Who needs a washing machine that connects to the internet to download new wash programmes? Most people only use 2 or 3 of their existing ones.

But now a whole set of markets are growing, for example sensors to tell when an elderly person hasn’t moved out of their chair for several hours or when they haven’t put the kettle on yet today. These can make all the difference to someone determined to keep their independence but whose loved ones are worried. Or building sensors to monitor electricity usage and damp levels in empty properties to guard against squatters and rain damage without expensive manual inspections.

Solution-based marketing

If your business has started from the solution, your marketing needs to create a need in order to convince people to buy. This can be a difficult sell – think how slowly 3D cinema has taken off, for instance, while 3D home TV has failed completely, for now at least. But there are plenty of examples of success as well.

When Henry Ford made cheap, reliable cars people said, ‘Nah, what’s wrong with a horse?’ That was a huge bet he made, and it worked.

Elon Musk

…spoken by a man famous for his own huge bets in creating new markets.

But should your vision change as you grow?

Product management talks of three key stages in the lifecycle of a product:

  • Pre-launch
  • In-life
  • End of life

Problem-based and solution-based visions can both work well at the pre-launch stage of a business or product. However, things get more complicated as the product matures and the company expands. Part 2 of this blog explores the competing influences trying to shape strategy for in-life products.