Perfect Biz Match | Transform

Diving In

You are a startup company or business unit entering a contested environment.

It is quite possible to succeed and even thrive by entering an already-contested marketplace - but only if your products or services are a natural fit with your existing capabilities (and, thus, you have low product development costs). To try to enter a jungle without such a fit is usually folly, because you simply won't be able to obtain the margins you need.

The other way to successfully dive into a jungle market is to serve your customers so well that you can charge slightly higher-than-average prices, and thus create the margins you'll need to cover market entry costs. This may enable you to triumph over companies entering the market with pioneer cultures and histories of serving frontier markets.

Key Issues
First, you must be able to offer products that have a proven demand. You cannot afford either the time or the expense of any significant market testing. Your organization must also be able to mobilize resources quickly, in response to sudden (or changing) opportunities that may present themselves.

If you are already an established name seeking to enter a jungle market with a new product line, your reputation in other markets can be a critical factor in opening distribution channels.

Common Difficulties
Addressing both efficiency and customer service
It is essential to determine the niche(s) that you can exploit with great care. Otherwise the normal and inevitable evaporation of margins can occur too quickly. That means that you need to stay very carefully attuned to your customers' needs, and just as attuned to producing your products very efficiently and effectively.

Avoiding complacency
There is absolutely no room for complacency - or even for temporary stasis - in a jungle market. Sometimes the only difference between success and failure is a willingness to seek out markets that have been underexploited. It also behooves your company to be open to adding products or services that have already proven successful - even if they may not fit with your company's earlier image. You may have to choose between sticking with your tried and-true product lines and going under, or staying competitive by adding an unusual new product line.

Becoming externally competitive, yet internally collaborative
One much less obvious - yet potentially insidious - difficulty is the nature of competitiveness itself. Because a strong competitive drive is essential for success in a jungle market, that competitive drive may manifest itself internally, with employees trying to outdo and undermine each other. This can create enormous internal friction that is - to say the
least - highly unproductive. Much time and energy may be wasted on internal battles, and, as a result, the company may not mobilize quickly enough to adequately respond to opportunities or customer demands.

Getting commitment to products
It can sometimes be difficult to get your people strongly committed to "me-to" products, since there is no long-term development phase. They may (quite correctly) see the company as feeding off the work of others, and perhaps (less correctly) of undercutting the hard work of pioneers.

Avoiding burnout
The jungle is intensely competitive. There are strong pricing pressures from other brands, particularly from the companies that led the way out of the frontier into the jungle. This intensity can drain people emotionally unless bureaucracy - particularly its negative aspects - is held to a bare minimum. Burnout is very common, because people are managing very large markets and producing larger and larger volumes with fewer and fewer people - usually relying increasingly on technology to hold it all together.

Getting up to speed
In a jungle market, it is usually very difficult to get up to speed with the competition in meeting customer expectations for quality and predictability. Starting up a new hunter organization is a bit like boarding a train going 100 miles an hour.

Finding leaders
It is absolutely critical to find the right people to lead your foray into the jungle. Simply finding the correct people can be a very difficult task. Yet you must find them and get them on board - because you know how dire the results of operating with the wrong people will be.

Solutions
Your organization is most likely to succeed if you focus your resources on the customers at the end of the supply chain. This means working backward from the customer to solve any problems. This can best be done through cross-functional teams that are built around trust and communication. Such teams are able to create collaborative work environments that focus people's attention outward rather than inward. As a result, these teams may be the means by which your company maintains the margins it needs to support the internal work.

You will also need to redesign your organization's structure so that there are as few levels of management as possible. Ideally, people should be organized according to customer niches. Use teams wherever possible to solve the very difficult problems brought on by combining low cost and high quality.

Adaptation Issues
Introducing a new product requires a huge commitment of resources - yet, in a jungle market, products need to be introduced quite quickly and efficiently. If you specialize in entering markets already occupied by new products, then you will have already developed a culture and infrastructure that will support your entry.
If the culture and infrastructure for doing this are not yet in place, then they need to be created. This is an enormous task, because your company has not yet learned the lessons about a frontier market that tell you what priorities are critical to success.

Your success will also be related to the kinds of alliances you have in this market. This is a big part of life in the jungle. You need to be able to reach out to other producers (or other parts of your supply chain) to get resources that your organization simply cannot provide. You will more than likely never be able to maintain all the essential links in that supply chain on your own.

Whatever new market you are entering, there are experienced people throughout the industry who know that market niche extremely well. You absolutely must find them and bring them into your organization, either as leaders or consultants. They will be invaluable in helping to guide strategy - and to keep the company from allocating very scarce resources based on a gut decision alone. (Industry experience and detailed market knowledge are crucial leadership attributes in the jungle.)

You must also be able to clearly differentiate each product or product line in some way in order to support it in its niche. Such clear differentiation becomes crucial in the jungle, where costumers can normally choose from among a large field of competing products. Even though you may be selling me-too products or services, they must have more than merely me-too value to your customers.

You need to be able to put together a team that can invade this market with a me-too product. This often means coaxing talented people away from your competitors. These folks can land on their feet and start running as soon as they arrive. Acquiring them, however, takes considerable resources and lots of flexibility in negotiations. (And don't expect them to stay to help build long-term capacity in your organization.)

Entrance into a jungle market is also a somewhat temporary endeavor. The competition at some point will begin to consolidate, and eventually the market will develop more and more attributes of a battleground.