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The Entrepreneur’s Playbook
- Take a basic product and make it special (upgrade). Premium bottled water (Fuji), expensive coffee (Starbucks), and gourmet cookies (Mrs. Fields) are examples of what were once pedestrian products that have driven successful new businesses. Sometimes you need to take a commonplace item, like a cup of coffee, and make it an “experience.”
- Offer a no-frills version of a high-end product (downgrade). For example, Southwest Airlines eliminated all the frills that usually come with an airline ticket, and now they are a market leader, being copied by the majors. In supermarkets, everyone today knows that generic brands often offer more value and quantity, without giving up key ingredients.
- Find products that seem to fit together (bundle). Instead of requiring people to shop and pay for related items, combine them into one package. Today’s smartphones are more attractive than a separate phone, camera, computer, and software packages. Sometimes just including training and installation makes a product more attractive.
- Break existing bundles into separate packages (unbundle). This is obviously the inverse of the bundle approach. Home computers have long been offered in unbundled as well as bundled hardware and software, to allow for a lower entry cost and flexible configuring versus simplicity. Long-term warranties are now unbundled from appliances.
- If a product sells in one area, transport it to another. Importers/exporters make their living this way with products from different parts of the country or the world. The same concept resulted in the birth of franchises, which are essentially proven business models transported to new locations. The Internet is a business for transporting web services.
- Expand a narrow product offering to the mass-market. A popular incarnation of this approach today is to take an Internet-only product into brick-and-mortar retail for access to a much larger audience. The same concept applied to every startup which test-markets its product in a local area, then scales the business for national or global access.
- Take a broad-appeal product into a niche. With the widespread popularity of social media, I now see many businesses looking at niche market interest groups, such as sites for travelers, hunters, cancer support, and crafts. In television, this is called narrow-casting, to gear specific channels to a special audience, like golf, old shows, or history.
- Maximize the selection of products offered (think big). This approach brought us the “big box” stores, including Walmart, Lowe’s, and Home Depot. Online, the same concept has been implemented by Amazon and Alibaba. It allows customers to complete their shopping in one place, and businesses get the value of volume and common processes.
- Focus on in-depth expertise and support (think small). This is the inverse of the “think big” strategy, which you see at your local hardware stores, with knowledgeable and friendly support staffs. They specialize in the depth of their selections that a true connoisseur demands. Online sites now advertise customized designs and personal fits.
