No audience is infinite. If you accept that any product, service, or work of art has a limited group of people that will be interested in it — ranging from hundreds of millions for mass-market products, to only a handful for the über-niche — then each new customer or fan you acquire depletes the number of potential fans by one more.
Yes, over time people's tastes can change. People who were not in your target audience can move into it. Becoming popular will cause new customers to jump on the bandwagon simply because you're now popular. You can change yourself to broaden your appeal. But no matter what, the fact remains that at some point you will get large enough that it will become increasingly difficult to grow larger still.
In economics they call this concept "Marginal Cost." It's defined as "the cost of producing one more unit of a good." Meaning, if you're currently making 10 T-Shirts, how much would the 11th shirt cost you. Most of the time, the marginal cost decreases during lower levels of production. and then begins to increase at higher levels of production. This happens because early on you can exploit certain efficiencies and economies of scale, but as they run out the cost of producing more of your product goes up.
The same thing occurs with your audience.
When you look at the graph above, instead of thinking "Cost" and "Volume," think "Difficulty" and "Number of Fans." When you first start out on the left side of the graph, with very few fans, there are a large number of people that fit into your potential audience but haven't been exposed to your product yet. Then, if you're successful, you begin to grow and wind up converting many of your potential fans into actual customers; moving to the right along the graph. This is where the difficulty goes down, since there are so many people who are interested in what you're offering, but haven't heard about you yet.
At some point though, you will start running out of potential fans, and being able grow substantially becomes more difficult. That's when the line starts curving up the further you move to the right.
What are you planning to do once that happens?
Most people are so focused on growth — more Facebook friends, more e-mail subscribers, more Twitter followers — that they don't even stop to consider this problem, let alone have a plan for when it happens.
One of the keys to success in marketing is being able to set yourself apart from your competition in the mind of the consumer. Two great books that provide different strategies for polarizing yourself from your competitors are Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout, and Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. While there are some differences in execution, both strategies rely on a common tactic — using your competition's schema to simultaneously define and differentiate yourself.
"Schema" is a term from psychology, and it means the set of generic properties that define a concept or category. For example, movie genres are a type of schema. If I say I saw a horror movie, your mind automatically generates a pre-concieved idea about the movie's traits, since you know what "horror movies" are like. You picture something with dark lighting, lots of blood, and shocking moments that make you jump. That's your schema for horror movies.
Both Crossing The Chasm and Positioning employ the idea of using the competition's schema in order to polarize yourself.
From Positioning:
The first step...is to bring the product out of the closet. To deliberately polarize the situation by using a negative name like soy butter. – p.75 in the 2000 printing.A negative name doesn’t necessarily include a negative term or paint the opposition in a negative way. It's a name that indicates you are similar enough to be a substitute for the product you're trying to beat, while also different in some key way. In the above example for soy butter, the name does two things. First it says the product is enough like butter to be a substitute (competitor), but it's also completely different from butter because it's made of soy. The name uses the idea, or schema, of "butter," but then clearly distinguishes itself as an alternative to butter with the word soy.
To continue with the soy butter example, soy butter is trying to get people to spend their "butter money" on soy butter instead of regular butter. Therefore, they need to speak the same marketing language as regular butter to indicate that they're an appropriate alternative. That's why the product name "soy butter" is so fitting. While it may have been tempting to try and come up with a more catchy name, "soy butter" conveys exactly what the product is and exactly what it's designed to replace, all in two words.
Another interesting side effect is what the name soy butter does to the name for regular butter. All of a sudden, you have to start referring to butter as "regular" or "normal" butter, instead of just "butter." Not only does the name soy butter enhance its own position, but it also downgrades the position of the established product. All of a sudden the standard becomes "normal," or "regular," and that can bring connotations of blandness and boredom for some consumers; opening a hole in their worldview for soy butter to fill.
So, using your competition's schema gives your message context. It will put you in the same spectrum as your competition, while using a negative name will put you at opposite ends of that spectrum.
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore says that in order for a disruptive new product to successfully cross over from the early market of Visionaries (or "Early Adopters") to the mainstream market of Pragmatists (or the "Early Majority"), a company needs to do something that seems counter-intuitive — create competition for their product.
Most companies dream of being the first product to the market, with no competition to speak of. The problem is that the mainstream market wants to buy from the leading company in a market that is established and mostly stable. If you don't have any competition, the market for your product won't appear to be established or stable to the Pragmatist buyer, and they will continue to wait for the market to mature.
Moore says the key to successfully crossing into the mainstream is referencing existing companies and technologies — in other words, existing schema — to contextualize your marketing efforts for the more conservative mainstream buyer. Specifically, you need to create both a Product Alternative and a Market Alternative. Just like Ries and Trout suggest with using the negative name, this is another way to "polarize the situation" using the competition's schema.
The Market Alternative is where you paint your product or service as a solution to the prospect's problems in a given area. If you're trying to sell the first computer-based word processors, then the market alternative would be typewriters, and you would try to use their schema to define and differentiate yourself. Using the Market Alternative provides context by highlighting where your product is superior to the older technology (You mean I can delete something when I make a mistake?! AWESOME!), while not overwhelming the prospect with an entirely new idea. Another way to think about it is which budget you're trying to steal from your competition. You're trying to get your prospect to spend whatever money they would have budgeted for a new typewriter on a word processor instead.
The Product Alternative is where you position yourself as the market leader in the newer market. You show that, of all the different brands selling computer-based word processors, yours is the best choice for the consumer. This is where, if you're Microsoft, you highlight all the ways Word is superior to Corel's WordPerfect.
Setting up the Market Alternative allows your prospect to analyze your product in reference to something they already understand, like typewriters, and makes it easier for them to envision how it would fit into their way of operating. Setting up the Product Alternative shows you are the leader in this new, established market by referencing your competition. Using a negative name defines your product by what it's hoping to replace. In all three of these methods, you are polarizing your product from the competition, while using their schema to provide the context.
This post stands on the shoulders of:
Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath: The concept of schemas from psychology
Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout: The negative name
Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore: The idea of the Product and Market Alternative
Whenever I hear people using buzzwords, it usually makes me cringe. For the longest time I couldn't understand why — after all, they are just terms used to express the common understanding of a complex idea in a single word or phrase. And there definitely times when I hear buzzwords used appropriately and have no problem with it, so for the longest time I couldn't figure out why I was so frequently disgusted.
The other day, it finally hit me.
Most of the time I cringe at buzzwords not because of the words themselves, but because of how they are being used; and more importantly what it says about the person using them. Most often, people use buzzwords because they are trying to sound fancy and impressive in order to cover up their lack of understanding for the topic.
When studying a new subject, new terminology is usually one of the first things that people are taught. These terms allow you to speak the language of the subject matter, and provide the foundation for you to develop a higher level of understanding.
Now there is obviously a need to have a common set of terminology in order to communicate effectively about a topic. The difference is that people with a mastery of the subject matter will use these words in a context that supports the idea they are trying to convey, while people using buzzwords use them in a way that shows off their use of the terms more so than their ideas.
In talking this way, these amateurs are broadcasting their laziness. They memorize a phrase and a quick definition and they're on their way, trying to sound like an expert without investing the time to develop a true understanding for the subject matter.
Because buzzwords simplify the concept into a single word, it also makes the concept easier for the uninitiated to understand. This allows them to ignore the intricacies in the subject matter that the buzzwords cover up. They only understand the simplification of the topic, instead of grasping it in-depth.
Using the latest buzzword can sometimes impress (or intimidate or bully) someone who is unfamiliar with the subject matter into thinking you are legitimate. But to someone who knows what they're talking about, it will only indicate that you have a surface understanding of the topic and are trying to compensate for that by using fancy terms.
Now I'm not saying don't use buzzwords. Like I said, using a common language for a given topic is essential for communicating effectively. Just don't fall into the trap of thinking memorizing a bunch of fancy words makes you a master on a subject. Or even worse, speaking like it does.
