Where to go when existing markets are crowded
As Life Science marketers should we keep targeting existing customers with the latest version of our product or should we be looking elsewhere? Are there under served markets that we can tap into?
Finding under served markets isn’t easy. If it was existing suppliers would have done it already. There might be very good reasons why no-one has gone after a particular under served market. Some of these include low profitability, an audience that is very spread out and difficult to find or users with very unique needs which require extensive changes to the product to make it suitable.
It is possible in some instances to find customers who aren’t yet tied to an existing solution. They might be in new geographies or they might not yet have realised the benefits of the product. For example, protein scientists who grow cells to express their protein of interest were a key target group for the cell imager that I mentioned in an earlier article* because they needed to check the health of their cells in culture without needing or wanting to know the ins and outs of how to use 3 different instruments for cell counting, imaging and cytometry.
Or you may be able to find a customer segment that values the benefits more highly than most because they have a specific need that isn’t well served by the existing technology. You might be able to use these customers to build a beachhead to target other customer segments at a later stage. For example, there are several different techniques for doing super resolution microscopy (SIM, STED, PALM/STORM). SIM doesn’t necessarily give the same level of resolution as the other techniques but it’s much kinder to live cells so it made sense to target SIM at super resolution users who were more interested in live cell work and then work outwards from there to penetrate other segments of the market.
One way to find customers who have not yet adopted the incumbent technology is to get the product into teaching labs where students are likely to go on to jobs in industry and academia and buy products that they are familiar with. Whatman filter papers did this quite successfully many years ago, when they produced a book with test sheets of filter paper that you could tear out and try. At one point Whatman was synonymous with filter paper.
How do you find under served markets where there is customer demand that’s not being met by adequate supply? This demand might be latent if the customers haven’t yet identified a potential solution. It takes a lot of digging to identify an underserved market. Spending time researching customer needs and asking questions like:
what are customers doing that could be improved;
what are the main pain points in their workflow and
what would they like to be able to do but currently can’t,
will help you to uncover opportunities. A deep understanding of the market from talking to experts and customers, conducting market research and experimenting with different product offers will help you to evaluate whether there is an opportunity or not. It’s also worth remembering that these customers might need more education and take longer to adopt a new technology if they are unfamiliar with it, so expect slower market penetration than would normally be the case in existing markets.
Finding these markets and a unique position in them requires a detailed understanding of what the target customers want to achieve i.e. a needs-based approach rather than a product based approach.
* Previous Article: What to do when marketing is gifted a new product by R&D.
This article is an extract from a podcast on Life Science Marketing Radio. You can listen to the full discussion between Chris Connor and Marina Hop by clicking on the link.
