Branson 101
In marketing, entrepreneurship matters more than ever
Saturday, 1 December, 2001
Down at
De’Amalfi Survival, near Auckland’s waterfront, they’re doing something remarkable tosafety helmets. De’Amalfi makes a lightweight communications helmet for use in noisy places likecoastguard vessels and war zones. Other helmet makers build complicated microphones inbooms that wrap around the face — which can distract the wearer and cause injury during a fall.No one else has put a microphone and transmitter in the shell of the helmet, where it picks upvibrations from the wearer’s skull and sends them back to base as speech. The breakthroughdesign is currently being trialled by Canadian police, the US coastguard and a film studio. Sales ofup to $US90 million are pending.
There’s a lesson in this. What De’Amalfi is doing to helmets, Dyson did to the vacuum cleaner,Absolut did to vodka and Branson did to airlines — they so fundamentally progressed a product itnow occupies a category of its own. By anticipating trends, they shape products and services tomeet demand — demand no one else has even noticed. They’re entrepreneurial marketers andNew Zealand desperately needs more of them.
Many Kiwi marketers I meet choose to limit their activity to the rather safe tasks of meeting “overt”and “covert” needs. They’re safe because they’re definable. You pick up overt needs by simplydoing quantitative research. Execs at Coke, say, will crunch through research telling them 25% ofconsumers are choosing Diet Coke. Suddenly, SpriteLite is born and is expected to get, say, 25%of the market. No sweet, no sweat.
You discover covert needs by doing qualitative research. This is where the product is notnecessarily asked for, but the need is articulated once you start poking around a bit. Someone in afocus group might complain about how those milk cartons always dribble and, hey presto, you’vegot Anchor’s pourable milk bottle.“Overt” and “covert” have been the lingua franca of marketers since World War II. They usuallydeliver sound results and they’re easy to sell to the board because, well, whoever got sackedbecause they gave consumers what they clearly want?
But you’re unlikely to get horribly rich, either. That’s because in a fiercely competitive market,incremental improvements deliver only incremental gains. Marketing to overt and covert needsrestricts you to a few approaches. You can introduce brand extensions (such as SpriteLite) or tryto capture an increasingly smaller share (first there was coffee, then there was a latte, then a trimlatte, then a trim latte with GE-free soy milk ... ).Another approach is to simply scrap over market share. Wine, now a supermarket commodity, isheading in this direction. With the same-looking products being offered, the main marketing effortis going into labelling, packaging, securing shelf space, point-of-sale and maybe co-operativeinitiatives with other food manufacturers. Discounting, that plague of the beer industry, is not faraway. Each of these strategies can be exhaustively tested and measured down to the lastdecimal. But like trench warfare, they’re exhausting, costly and most often won by the biggestarmy.Adam Morgan, author of marketing text
Eating the Big Fish
, writes: “If you are small and theenemy has got big guns, don’t kid yourself guns are the answer — come up with a new way to
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