Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Serendipity

Good morning from Europe. I think the best thing to look for is "unexpected markets" - now since marketing's all about communication, knowing who you're communicating with is crucial. In most academic literature customers are consumers - and the difference is important. A customer is someone, the consumer is a country (as it were). Consumers are bland faceless creatures, customers are a more dangerous kind of animal that might bite -or at least have that appearance to some! That is to say, consumers are bland and it's easy to sell to them - with customers being so vivid you might make a mistake when selling to them ... are you getting my drift here? Because this is important to the way universities think about marketing.

What I mean by this is that if you're selling everything to everyone you're not going to notice the kind of person who's buying. More importantly you're not going to know who they are. As importantly I find little in the academic literature that deals with the character of any given situation. It's all branding and selling. That is given the little I've read - but I do speak with academics on a regular basis and frankly, when it comes to marketing, they're a waste of space.

But that's just my opinion.

The point I'm making here is that this is a subtle phenomenon that is neither easy to observe nor easy to determine. It's like the lookouts on the Titanic - I wrote about their experience of being in absolute darkness. Apart from the stars in the heaven they could literally see nothing.

At all.

It was black, quiet and with a quiet vessel like Titanic, they could have been flying for all they knew. Steam engines are very quiet and have little vibration. Now when something's missing you tend to think it's you that's wrong. The psychology of this is important to your question, and it's incredibly hard to do in practice!! Lose a Facebook friend and you cannot for the life of you remember who it was ... and we're dealing with the same phenomenon here. Anyway the lookouts noticed that a star had disappeared. Why would a star disappear? Did it even disappear? Were they just seeing things??? When another and another go - then they know something's up.

Because there was only one thing that could have been blocking them out, but since we know what it was we think it was easy to see!

It wasn't.

Which is why I've told you this story - and knowing academics, it's the sort of thinking that's largely beyond them in my personal experience. As much as anything, I want you to grasp the power of your own imagination in this, because it's an enormous asset.

**Down to business:**

from the quick search I did, I came up with this which might just give you the direction you need.

https://www.spruancegroup.com/spruancequarterly/unexpected-customers-from-u...

It also has a lovely story from the master Peter Drucker, a rare man who combined academic thought and insights.

In answer to your question - my own description of this phenomenon would be "unexpected markets" - only please do not expect an avalanche of academic papers on the subject just because you know what you're looking for. That's why I wrote my preamble. I do not know the name of the business Drucker referred to; perhaps if you could find out who they are it would give you something concrete to use in your study?

Does this get you a step along the way? I hope so. Good luck and good studying!

I like Moriarty's "unexpected markets", if you really need a term.

But really I think it is just plain good luck, as now you know of another market you can easily grow in to.