Changes in technology, people, demographics, and markets provide challenges and opportunities. For example, a friend reminded me of what it was like to go skiing when ski hills had incredibly slow two person chair lifts. Then along came four person detachable high speed chair lifts. Ski hills that embraced the new technology could not only take many more people up the hill every hour, they had a strong competitive market advantage over those that stuck with the old chair lift technology.
I am a big fan of The Age of Persuasion, a radio show about marketing by Toronto’s Terry O’Reilly and Mark Tennant. In many of their podcasts, Terry and Mark link the start of big changes in marketing and advertising to market opportunities brought about by these innovations:
Newspapers: The introduction of newspapers provided a medium that a large number of people read every day. They were naturally segmented by geography as most newspapers only covered a single city or town. Many entrepreneurs saw this as a market opportunity to raise awareness and drive traffic to their stores through advertising.
Radio: The wide adoption of radio and the popularity of radio programs that aired at the same time on the same day each week created captive audiences. Long before Facebook or Twitter created social networks, people were connected by listening together to the same radio program. Clever advertisers took advantage of this new opportunity to sponsor programs, dramatically increasing their brand awareness, resulting in increased sales.
In today’s age, many shy away from new market opportunities. The bold seize those opportunities, taking advantage of them to create sustainable market advantage. The good news is that new market opportunities are as plentiful today as they have ever been.
