It took 20 years to spread the concept of selling sliced bread. The slicing bread concept became a big hit in 1932. Everyone started eating sliced bread with a single line trigger in an advertisement campaign. The line was “Build Strong Body in Twelve Days.” The tagline shifted the slicing bread concept to high speed and created super-fast sales channels.
But slicing bread was initially invented by Fredrick Rohwedder in 1912, twenty years. Many useful products are ignored at this time since everyone wanted to trigger attention. Hence customers did not care about good outcomes. Slice bread invention did not have the required trigger and missed an opportunity of slicing millions of bread. Often advertisement campaigns miss the market desire, and because of this, useful inventions are sitting in garages. Good inventions are not aimed to craft the market’s appetite, and hence it struggles initially to get an audience’s attention. We cannot create desire at the market, but all we can do is use the market desire, enhance it, and make use of it.
When slicing the bread machine was invented, the problem was purely about cutting the bread. But slicing the bread does not have a great desire. Cutting the bread was more of an inventor’s situation, and he had initially failed to understand the market place desire and what the market wants.
This article will go through three parts that will help us understand the marketing problems.
- Mistaking your problem as Market Problem
- Understanding your desire or a Market Desire
- Digging problems with patterns
Let’s go through the first part of the article.
Misinterpretation of your problem as Market Problem
As entrepreneurs, we try to solve the problems as soon as we find some difficulty in our life. When we face a problem, we try to fix it and see if we can create a business. Without understanding the problem clearly, we start fixing things and ready to start our business since we know a problem that needs a clear solution. We blame the existing marketplace and products which solve our needs, and we try to invent a new solution out of thin air. We don’t understand the real question during this problem and know that the problem is a personal or an industry problem. The moment you find your problem has a scope of as an industry problem, then our energy and time are worth proceeding. We try to isolate the problem. Before we try to spend energy and time, we can explore the second section.
Understanding your desire or a Market Desire
When we have a problem, there is a desire to solve that problem. Often this desire is within us, and it is not outside of us. One’s passion is so great to solve this problem; we forget that not everyone wants to solve your problem. When an entrepreneur has a burning desire to solve a problem, he believes that the market has the same passion. He thinks the market needs this problem to be solved, and he never checks the market’s desire. The entrepreneur’s ego blocked the fact that there is no market desire and failed to understand the simple fact that the solution is personal and not viable for a market solution. When entrepreneurs go through confirmation-bias kicks in all the decisions, he makes based on his confirmation bias and not testing his solutions scientifically. Now, Let’s go through the third part of the article, which explains the pattern-based approach to overcome the confirmation bias.Now, let’s cover the third part of the article.
Approaching problems with patterns
When we strongly feel that our solution to the problem is an industry-related problem, we can dig in more and identify all the other problems aligned with your core problem. When we start remembering all the relevant problems, then we start seeing it as a pattern. When you see there is a pattern, the problems with a structure having its birthplace. Now your problem is pattern-oriented, and you see your problem from many angles. When you approach your problem from many angles, you see industry related viable market place for your problem. Your market is ready to listen to your story since you have overcome and understood the problem very well
But why you need to stop this itch of creating something when you are ready
As an entrepreneur, you want to reduce risk mitigation, and all your activities should aim towards lowering your business risk. The time you spend on your business idea and marketing campaign needs validation, and you need to balance the emotional elements when you decide to validate your problem statements. When we don’t dig into problems, the problem is vague, and we are not confident to make it a viable business idea. We will start exploring in-depth details about your concept the moment we face the first kind of failure. But when it happens, it is too late, and you would have spent an enormous amount of time and energy on your idea and business problem.
Let’s cover with an example of my two-year-old daughter’s desire.
I always like to eat groundnuts, and the last time I was trying to eat, my daughter was sitting next to me. I had a cup of groundnut, and I had to open the groundnut one by one. But my daughter, who is two years old, is not ready to wait and she was screaming. She wanted to open all the ground nuts at once, which is impossible to do with two hands. Her desire to open all the groundnut at the same time is challenging. At any point in time, you can open only one groundnut and eat it. You can argue with me that the machines can open more than one coconut.
But our brain is not a machine. It works sequentially regardless of we try to do multi-tasking. We can open only one groundnut at a time, and that is our limitation. Even if you try very hard with two hands, one hand will wait for a couple of microseconds before completing its task. When we desire, we try to approach all of the desires, like opening all the groundnut simultaneously. It is impossible to solve all the desires together. Hence we can close our situation as one small problem and dig deep and understand it correctly. That’s how you enjoy eating small groundnuts and have joy.
Summary
In this article, we have covered. How to understand the problem and how not to waste millions of hours and energy with your marketing problem. We have covered how the issues can be approached in a small way using groundnut opening. Later we have covered three parts in this article, and the first part is a misinterpretation of your problems vs. Market Problem. The second part is understanding your marketplace’s desire, and the third part is Approaching problems with patterns. When you follow the three steps, you can have your slice of bread from your market and grow as well.