By Peter Getman
Principal Brand Director

I visit with 10+ entrepreneurs a week [one of my favorite activities, no doubt] about their brand opportunities.

Their business opportunities tend to fall into 3 buckets:

1. Entrepreneurs who have developed a sound product/solution but it solves a problem nobody “has to” solve immediately.

   Sometimes the product is too early, sometimes the problem is unknown and the consumer simply needs to be educated, and other times it’s only a problem in the entrepreneur’s mind.

2. Entrepreneurs who believe they have innovated a whole new product, when in reality what they have innovated are simply a few new product features.

   The mass consumer does not buy new features, and if they do, they buy them from known brands in that market category. From a new, unknown, yet-to-be-proven brand, they buy new solutions—and only if that brand’s value proposition is well stated.

3. Entrepreneurs that are go-to-market ready.
   • The problem they solve is real; and there is value in solving it.
   • The product is proven once and in doing so, the consumer is willing to be the brand’s testimony.
   • We are able to effectively educate the market on the emotional value in solving the problem.
   • They are financially and mentally prepared to invest in properly doing so.

I’ve learned to identify these slight differences over the years. Early in my career, I learned this the hard way, when we would be retained by a brand to craft their go-to-market strategy and brand position and then realize … Uh oh …

• It’s a great product, but it’s too early, so it fails. Then, five years later … same concept succeeds in a ready market. We launched the “Photo Highway” brand and took it public five years too early, then Snapfish came along when the world was ready and crushed it.

  Painful to watch, made my eyes bleed.

• It’s a new brand with no real financial muscle. Rather than be able to properly educate the market on the value of switching brands, they had just enough capital to educate the competition on this great new solution. Cockadoodle Doo told the world and its competitors that organic fertilizer is a massive market, but didn’t have the $ to own the market category in the minds of the consumers. So Scotts didn’t buy them and launched their own brand.

  I still have a pit in my stomach on this one, and I know I’m not alone.

• The product under-delivers. Then, you guessed it; the competition gets the product right.

  Remember the brand March First? I do. Ouch. Perfectly positioned, sales boomed, it hits a billion dollar valuation and then someone said, “Hey wait, this doesn’t really work the way it needs to. So it goes belly up. Some short years later, in walks Salesforce.com and over-delivers on its promise of value via an “easy-to-buy” business model.

  This one was a total blur. This is the ultimate example of a “vaporware” play. Crazy really. Fortunately we were the agency of record when Red Hat went public around this same time frame, which is still the most successful IPO in history. Cool, huh?

The good news in all this experience is that today when our agency takes on a new client, we are damn sure we that all the ingredients are in place and we simply need to our job. Amazing what 44,000 hours of experience in go-to-market brand strategy gives me for insight. The bad news is that 9 out of 10 entrepreneurs I meet seem to fall into the wrong bucket. Which bucket do you fall in?

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