Broadband and Me

What market am I in?

I have been essentially frustrated of late. Frustrated in the sense of not being able to achieve certain goals I set myself and not being able to articulate in a meaningful way how to move forward. Its led to a blogging paralysis as well where I'm keep trying to second guess myself on what to write.

The reason I mention this is because I think its something that quite often happens in business as well. A company ends up navel gazing far too much and not focusing on what its customers want, or even more fuindamentally who are its markets?

From my own perspective I felt the market wanted a piece of paper to say I can do things. I spent two years getting a formal qualification in marketing. Last week I went and received my award: a Professional Post-graduate Diploma in Marketing from the CIM. Quite a grand occasion at the Symphony hall in Birmingham, with some surprisingly passionate speeches by Professor Maclolm Macdonald and Lord Heseltine. The passion being in a rallying cry to graduands to continue to develop marketing as a profession and evangelise marketing to others as something more than promotion and advertising.

Has it allowed me to move forward? Well its allowed me to look at business in a quite different light. It allows me to use the 'correct' words in describing concepts such as segmentation, situational analysis, and utilse acronyms like AIDA and SVA and actually know what they mean.

So from having some experience in doing, to having a formal bit of paper, therefore the market should love me? Yes? No.

I'm making the same kind of mistakes that companies do too. I'm not talking to cmpanies and finding out what they want, I'm not engaging with the market. I'm also not differentiating myself from others in a positive way.

The key reason for this maybe like a lot of firms as I mentioned above is that I haven't clearly established in my own mind what is my target market and how to make that market aware of my existence.

So why am I telling you this? Well primarily I'm telling myself. I can't hide from this, and I need to provke myself to move forward. And it gives me an excuse to write in a more targetted way. Perhaps even engage some people in conversation.

Posted by Paul Goodison at November 8, 2005 10:26 AM | TrackBack

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