Focus your marketing efforts

Chris Lieto, the USA’s top ironman triathlete and regarded as one of the world’s top performers in his sport, raced Tour De France legend Lance Armstrong in a time trial over 18 kms.

Armstrong won of course. How could Lieto, an athlete focusing on three disciplines (swimming, cycling and running), no matter how fit, beat an elite specialist in a single sport.

A basic rule of marketing

When it comes to export marketing, too many companies fail to observe this basic law of focus, and struggle to gain momentum because of it.

Focusing on a market is one of the most important decisions any exporter can make, especially those selling complex products business-to-business.

Markets are sets of customers with similar needs, typically a group of people or organisations connected in some way.

They have issues and motivations in common, and can be reached through the same industry associations, distributors, trade events, online and offline media.

‘We are focused,’ I hear people say, ‘we’re selling into US healthcare.’

Healthcare in the US is a vast group of entities with an annual spend of over $2 trillion (i.e. roughly 20 times the size of the whole New Zealand economy).

‘If we only get 0.005 percent of this market we’ll be rich,’ they say.

That kind of thinking is seductive but misleading.

It is not the size of a market that is relevant, but how many customers in those markets that actually have a need for your product and are willing to part with cash to buy it.

By looking at it from the customer’s perspective - their needs, economic pressures, regulatory restrictions, buying cycle, competitive offerings etc – it is easy to see how a billion-dollar market can quickly shrink.

New Zealand culture is by necessity jack-of-all-trades - being able to meet the needs of any customer.

That flexibility and innovation is one of our strengths and works well in the domestic market, but can hamstring us when it comes to marketing internationally.

Being all things to all people simply doesn’t work, or at least not for very long, when you are trying to penetrate large offshore markets.