Breaking into a market?

Ok, I've seen people saying that the presense of an incumbent in a market in SL should be no barrier to attempting to enter it yourself, so I'm wondering what people think are the best ways of dealing with such a situation? Obviously making the product as good as possible is important, but then there's a trick in getting people to notice that the product is good when they're going straight to the incumbent when they need one.

Also, would people think it was unethical to offer a cheaper version of the new product (or a rebate) to anyone who gives me their copy of the incumbent competing product, which is then deleted? I know it's done by some companies IRL but folks I've mentioned it to on SL seem to think it'd be a bad thing to do.

The best method I found has been word of mouth. If you get a few people to notice, they tell more and yet more. It takes time. There will be frustration and a lot of patience needed, but in the end it works. At least it worked for me.

Here'd be my suggestion, Yumi:

1. Identify who your 'target audience' is for your product. Once you've got that, maybe find ways to advertise in ways that will reach those people.

2. What's going to make people who have already forked out money to buy your competitor's product buy yours is not offering a less expensive version yourself (Although that might work for new purchases). What will make existing owners of your competitor's product want to buy yours, is if your product is better. If its not possible to make yours better, instead find a way to somehow differentiate your product from your competitor's.

I don't think its unethical to offer a discount for 'turning in' the old product - I just don't think it will be very effective. Providing you've done the marketing work - if you have a superior product, it'll sell.

Good Luck!

Thanks for your suggestions, Travis. The big problem I can see with that, though, is that it assumes there are advertising sites that would reach the same target market as the incumbent, but that the incumbent isn't already using. Now, I might just be paranoid, but I thought that in order to get to be an incumbent you have to not drop the ball like that.

It doesn't matter if the other advertising outlets already have the competitor product. Just get the product out there, use the available options and give a few to people so it'll be seen inworld. Discount. Make sure the first few sales have great customer service. Just put it out there.

Business in SL is primarily by word of mouth.

Whenever I start doing custom work, it takes a few weeks to get a customer. Then they tell their friends/show off the home. Then I get a few more jobs. Then more. Then more. Eventually I end up having to turn away people due to being unable to fulfill all custom job orders, or I get burned out (what happened last time).

Word of mouth is a very powerful snowball effect. Be careful if you're doing custom work; if you're doing stuff that's easily saleable (prefabs, clothing, etc.), then go hog-wild.

Well-placed ads can't hurt either.

Actually, I'd encourage that every sale, from the first through the thousandth, have amazing customer service, but I don't think Gabe meant otherwise.

As for the rest, as Travis mentioned, it's crucial to differentiate your product from the competition. You can do that via price, quality or design, or any combination of the three. Don't try to out-cheap the competition -- eventually your product loses credibility if the perception is that it's a cheap knockoff.

The most important part about going into a market dominated by another player is that you have no baggage -- the other guy does. The other guy has already proven, to one extent or another, that the market exists. There are some things he could do better or that he has failed completely to provide. Discover those things and provide them, while also meeting or exceeding other important qualities of the product.

Ultimately, you can spend as much as you want on advertising, but SL continues to be driven mostly by word-of-mouth, since the quality of products can be so uneven and unpredictable. Be absolutely certain you test your product as thoroughly as possible. If it is sophisticated and improvements are planned, include an automatic update feature.

But most importantly, make sure you're making something you're really going to love. Only something that has been shown that extra, uncompromising guidance of true, impassioned love will be able to come out on top. If you're doing it just to do it, that'll show. Don't ever dare ship something that's "good enough."

To overthrow an incumbent, one must not only have outstanding customer service and product, but to be different in such a way as to make others take notice.

1. Build customer loyalty via great customer service. I have seen designers get into fights with customers over petty amounts of money. I have also seen content creators treat their customers rudely over "stupid questions" or some such nonsense. I am flattered every time somebody buys something from me, and I treat them as if they have honored me (they have).

2. Try not to look at established content creators as abstacles to your own success. When I started in Second Life two years ago, Nephaline Protagonist was queen of SL's fashion design world. But NOW ... um, looks like she still is! It really hasn't effected my own personal success (and I love Neph to death.) It's fairly unlikely that your success will come at the expense of others. Carve your own success out of an ever growing world and don't worry about what other people are doing.

3. Don't get discouraged if you don't catch up with your target incumbant in a fraction of the time it took for them to reach their level of success. Torrid Midnight spent 2.5 or so years getting to where she is now. If a designer can't pass her in 6 months (by then she will have been in the biz 3 years) it's hardly a reason to become frustrated (or as I have seen in the past, PISSED OFF!) Just keep doing your thing.

Wow, this is such a good point. It should be written upon the heart in letters of fire. Treat each customer with patience and respect, for they have indeed honored you and permitted you the luxury of additional money.



Another excellent point that mirrors my own experience! I always looked at Francis Chung as an example and role model in my own business. Though we were both drawing pieces of the same pie, which is people who like objects that help them kick ass, I always looked at Francis with respect and Francis was even generous enough to share technology with me. It would have been easy for either of us to look at eachother with suspicion, but it didn't work out that way at all.



This really, really deserves to be absorbed. True satisfaction comes not from looking at others, but looking at oneself. If you spend all your time thinking about the other guy, I don't know how much fun you can truly be having with the experience.

Be sure to promote your products using the classified forums here. They really do work. And don't just slap up a little text. Put up a picture or screenshot when applicable. Also, use at least one of the online website to market your products. I use SLexchange, and a decent percentage of my sales comes from there.

There are some excellent responses to this thread. I would build on Travis's suggestion to find a target market by looking, further, to how your product differentiates from your competition's and making that clear in your marketing.

Example: Coke and Pepsi are almost the same. Almost. Pepsi is sweeter and a younger company. They differentiated themselves in a successful ad campaign by calling their product one for the "Next Generation," capitalizing on these minor differences. Coke responded with two impulses, one successful and one unsuccessful. They successfully appealed to user sentimentality by choosing to occupy the other end of the spectrum: classic. The unsuccessful campaign was when they tried to occupy the same end of the spectrum as pepsi by inventing "new coke."

Moral of the story: embrace what makes your product unique and see if you can find users who have needs (whether they know it or not) that the incumbant's product isn't meeting.

I think people worry too much about other's success.

For instance, I do 19th century homes - am I *really* taking any business away from Lordfly and Juro? I doubt it.

The people that like their stuff probably don't like my stuff. Also, people simply want more choice and don't want to live in, or wear exactly the same thing their neighbours are.

It's silly to just give up or be a nonstarter - that's the *one thing* that ensures dominance by an incumbent.


I have to second what Lordfly said about custom work - occasionally I get talked into it but I've now sworn off it forever. Just takes too much time. People hear one peep of it and I get overwhelmed by word of mouth alone, in a couple weeks.

So - after multiple forum posts about how everything has been done - and not imaginative enough to do your own thing, your now asking us how you should go about it?

I wouldn't be too worried - probably be put on the 'too hard' list in another 5 minutes.

I thought you were being uncharitable here, Siggy, but the OP didn't really respond to the volumes of advice poured forth, so maybe I was wrong.

It's really not as simple as calling llMakeCoolProduct().

I think Siggy was spot on in his assessment. I suppose no response is better than systematically detailing why each suggestion really won't work.

I read it that she is trying to figure out how to get a business of her own off the ground, and soliciting opinion. As is obviously her wont.

But - some of you have already made up your mind about her apparently, and closed said mind, so I guess that's that. That seems to be all the past three posts have been about.

coco

Well, that is not really the entire story as this thread does not exist in a vaccuum. Having had some back in forth with the poster in other similar, yet slightly different threads about how impossible it is to compete or create in the SL environment, I found this to be another way to say the same thing.

That said, my first post was strictly in response to the question posed.

Incumbants in the market don't mean a thang. It would seem to me that a good percent of the players on the grid at anytime are new players who don't know a FIC from a foo.

Make what you know and love and give it lots of time.

I LOVE motorcyles in RL. I own 3 and read about them all the time. So i make them here with love and they move. I hand out free updates as i think of ways to improve them. People who buy an item like to get a free update. Who doesn't? They show thier friends, their friends buy one, they show their friends...

There were allready a couple of established motorcycle makers here when i started. Didn't mean a thing. I didn't sell any for a month, then maybe one sale every 2 weeks. Now it's 5-10 a day. This took over a year.

I don't build cars, cause i hate them. I'm sure i could sell some, but they wouldn't be what i know and love and it would show. They would be inferior to others.

I'm just saying keep at it and create what you know instead of trying to make a half-assed knock off of someone elses idea to make some L. This will fail.

The idea of offering a discount on a trade in of a competitors item doesn't sound like a good idea to me. Who cares if they own the compititions item? This doesn't make sense.

No I made up my mind on the several other threads about much similar topics by the OP - where it was said that everything was too hard and everything had been done before.
So no suprise to see a thread about overthrowing an existing product / service.

But like I said - based on the previous discussions - I think it will again come down to 'too hard'.

I'm just calling it as I see it.

I'm with you on that Les - absolutley - I've told folks time after time 'you don't necessarily have to be first - just try and and be the best'

Ultimately it comes down to loving what you make - spending the time to make it the best you can make it - not for the dollar tag, but for your own pride. You may never see money proportinate to the effort you put in, and I think the 'love over gold' shows in a lot of the cooler things in SL.

You just gotta make what you think is cool, for you, and take it as a bonus if others also like it.

It doesn't get any truer than this. Very well said. I wouldn't see nearly the success I currently do if I didn't truly love the process of making my products.

I totally agree! The incombants don't mean a thing. First off, regardless of what you do, it's going to be different from the way they did it, you can't help that. People like a variety of things. The way you do it may appeal to people who weren't attracted to the other versions, or - in addition to the appeal of other versions. People like variety!

Just because you have one shirt in your closet you like better than the others doesn't mean you don't "need" the others, or never wear the others! Or would never buy a new shirt! Or would never buy ANY shirt that didn't have all the same advantages of the old shirt!

If somebody buys your item, it is because they like it! If they are pleased with it, wonderful! If they are pleased with it enough to write and TELL you how pleased they are, fabulous! That's all you need, you don't need to knock out any competitor.

Take houses. There are niche markets there, and there's room for more than one designer in each (of many) niches. One person, after all, can only put out so much so often, and somebody may be in the mood to buy something like yours, but you don't have anything new out at the moment, so that person buys from one of the other people in that niche market.

But it comes around to you, too - when the customer has seen all of the other person's, and wants something new, he comes to you. People never get tired of buying stuff!

I could go on and on.

Now if you make something and advertise it and nobody ever, ever buys it - well, then you can figure maybe you are making the wrong thing.

(As for refund on a competitor's product, no no no, never.)

coco

Hi folks,

Thanks for all the advice! I didn't respond to it because I figured I ought to shut up and listen instead of arguing with people for a change. I'm not quite sure how to apply it to scripted items, which are what I'm best at making (it's different to have two scripted items that do basically the same thing, but differ in the same way that two shirts could differ).



I'm interested why you'd consider this so bad - I know a lot of RL companies do it, which was where I got the idea.

This is very important. If you come off as a cheap copycat, you will never win.


While having the best product is fine and dandy, it won't always be perceived as the best. Perception is king.
----

What you must do is to position yourself (how buyers perceive your product) in such a way that it is hard to beat you. Someone can always beat you on things like best, biggest, nicest, friendliest, easiest etc.

But one thing that is impossible to beat is FIRST. There can only be ONE first. Its the real thing. Pepsi will never be able to beat Coke because of this. Pepsi will always be a knockoff, no matter how they try to distance themselves from Coke.

Beating the market leader is hard. One of the best marketing strategies I've seen against a market leader was Avis's campaign going something like this: "We're not the biggest, so we try harder". Avis managed to position themselves as the best car rental service with this strategy. They rised quickly to #2, but Hertz was still #1. This was many years ago. Hertz is still the biggest.

Trying to beat the leader usually takes up so much resources that you end up with a broken back. And you will probably not make it, but if you work hard, you can end up as #2 or 3.

IMO a better solution if you want to become #1, is to create a new market where you can be FIRST. You can do that by marketing your product as something different. Example: Dove soap. Its not any ordinary soap, you know. Its a moisturizing wash-thingy, says the marketing. They created a (perceived) new market (moisturizing soap) that ate shares from the regular hand soap market. Dove actually managed to become the best selling hand soap (even if they say it isn't a soap!) with this strategy.

The moisturizing thing can seem like a stupid gimmick, but gimmicks like that works to position your product as something different in the potential customer's minds. If you manage to do this, you get three strong points you can use to increase your sales:

#1 This is a new product, giving customers something they've never seen before. In other words, newsworthy. News is the best marketing you can get, it gets attention. This IS the way to put new products on the market without huge advertizing costs. You can ignore this fact if you're as rich and powerful as Proctor & Gamble.

And when the competition starts to pop up:
#2 You are the market leader. The best selling product of this kind. This makes your potential customers perceive your product as the best. (The bestseller must be the best, eh?) Even if it isn't.

And when they start getting cocky, you just pull out the ace (just like Coke did when Pepsi was getting cocky and started eating market shares during the New Generation campaign):

#3 Its the real thing, the original. Everything else is copies.
It will drive your competitors crazy. There is no way they can beat that.

"The real thing" campaign quickly stopped Pepsi's increase in market shares. Pepsi may be perceived as the best tasting coca nut soft drink, but they will always be perceived as copycats.



Good luck!