2009 Q1 Book Review
Creating and Dominating New Markets
by Peter Meyer
In Creating and Dominating New Markets, Peter Meyer offers a guide to owners and managers who want to plan, create and dominate markets but also reduce their risk. Companies that have been successful at creating new markets have several common key elements.
Those principles for increasing the chances of repeated success are: Customer-driven markets work better than vendor-driven markets. Customers will buy what they want, not what a company thinks they want. Take the two lower risk paths to a new market by either developing a new product for a known market or take a known product into a new market. Be willing to ignore opportunities to avoid diluting efforts. Not every opportunity is worth the chase – especially if it drains resources from other initiatives. Start with cross-functional teams and leadership. Creating new markets should not be left to one function (marketing, for example). No single business function can produce new markets alone.
Meyer writes that companies do not find new markets: They create them by finding the solution to a problem that people want resolved. In other words, a new market exists at the convergence of a high level of perceived need with a solution that did not previously exist.
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