4 Situations in Marketing: One, Few, Most, or All
4 June 2007Seth Godin has an interesting post called “One, a few, most or all” where he discusses about what he calls the 4 situations in marketing. He makes this distinction based on who you need to influence. As the un-initiated (aka, not a marketing guy) I know that you have to be aware of your audience and potential customer, but after reading this post it makes it completely clear that you have to approach each situation differently in order to succeed. Here are the situations:
- One. When you need to fill a job or sell a house you only need to convince one person.
- Few. When you want to be the hot local restaurant, or sell many copies of a book, or be a popular TV show you have to convince quite a few people.
- Most. Some businesses only work when a large number of people participate: LinkedIN, Ebay, Paypal, YouTube for example, or a telephone company or the mail service.
- All. When you need to convince all of a panel or group in order to win, for example to specific your product as an industry requirement, or you need the support of 51 senators to pass your bill, or you need a town council to approve your building permit.
Thinking more about this specific grouping, it is very evident that you need to know which situation you are in before you develop your strategy. Sometimes this situation will be determined by business model economics, while in other cases this might be determined be product maturity, % market share, or legislative situation. In all cases knowing your situation will help you to develop a strategy that is more aligned with your goal.
- C an you identify which of your potential product or service offerings might fall into these categories?
- How does your strategy for approaching and intereacting with a customer change with respect to what situation you are in?
- Do certain market segments always fall into the same marketing situations?
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