Do you balance your focus on supply or demand? We all know that supply and demand can be both a market focus and a marketing strategy. As a marketing strategy, product availability and competition drive heavy statistical calculations that compel brands to modify price-points, thereby influencing the ebb and flow of liquid markets. However, you can also look at supply and demand balance without combing copious amounts of market data and hiring a full-time statistician. We tend to utilize this balance as a market focal point in discovering where you fit in the marketplace. If you’ve done your due diligence and market research, now is a good time to start focusing on the balance between supply and demand, before jumping into price-centric strategies.

During our discovery meetings, we listen to a lot of start-ups that focus solely on what they have to offer rather than what the market wants. At the same time, when launching product/service marketing with features and benefits, we tend to focus on the product, rather than the market demand. Often these qualities are product-centric and hardly scratch the surface of the more important factors of need vs. want. It’s not really until you get into the “why these features and benefits matter” that you begin to understand the market factors as they relate to the target audience. From here it takes careful alignment to position your offering, both against the competition and the demand of your market.

Without demand, nothing sells…no matter how big your supply is.

Strategic MMC utilizes cost-effective market research strategies to develop a theoretical image of what the market actually wants versus speculation or what we think the market actually wants. This helps separate biases and loyalties to our own offerings from the actual state of the market. While passion helps start-ups create solutions to problems in order to make people’s lives better, market research helps us ground those solutions in the brandscape. This allows us to then balance supply chains and assess the actual demand and what that demand is actually worth.