Making the Right Match

It has, I hope, become clear by now that in order to successfully market any product or service, a company must first identify which of the four market environments the product will be sold in.  Then it needs to adapt (or create) a marketing strategy to suit that environment.  

But this alone is still not enough  The organization must also adapt itself - its processes, its internal structures, and its culture - to that environment.  If it cannot, then it needs to analyze what market environment it is suited to succeed in, and then redesign its products - or its marketing - to be appropriate for that environment.  Failure to take either of these courses of action typically leads to failure.

The remainder of Perfect Biz Match will address this central issue of fit and adaptation from a variety of perspectives, with an emphasis on specific things you can do to help create the right match in your own organization.

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Four Types of MarketsTransforming a Kingdom Mentality As little as two decades ago, a large number of American companies operated in kingdom environments.  Most of those environments are gone, transformed into  battlegrounds or jungles by the pressures of globalization, technology, increased efficiency, and the ever-increasing demands for improved quality and low prices. Read More Making the Right Match It has, I hope, become clear by now that in order to successfully market any product or service, a company must first identify which of the four market environments the product will be sold in.  Then it needs to adapt (or create) a marketing strategy to suit that environment. Read More Product Life Cycles Yet another crucial dynamic involves the life of each particular product or service.  Each starts out in the frontier as something new to the world and, thus, more or less proprietary.  As it becomes better known and more widely accepted, however, it turns slowly (and sometimes not so slowly) into a commodity.  In other words, it has gone through the crucible of business consolidations that lead to low margins and high volume.  A good example is personal computers.  These were essentially new products until the late 1980's, but are now commodity items with few differences between brands. Read More Product Evolution and Market Flow No one product or industry remains in a single market environment forever.  Like any other dynamic system, the market for any product or service is always in some flux.  Read More Market Dynamics Each of the four market environments requires its own organizational structure and set of behaviors. Furthermore, each must follow a unique strategic style if the company is to survive, succeed, and excel.  In short, what will work for Coca-Cola will spell disaster for amazon.com, and vice versa.  Read More Some Real World Examples One way to better understand these four market environments is to look at some companies that routinely do business in them. Read More Four Market Archetypes Each of today's organizations operates in one or more of these four distinctly different market environments: the kingdom, the battleground, the jungle, and the frontier. Read More