Jun 29, 2016
Think about an established farmers market with an established
customer base.
Everyone shopping at that market has their preferred vendors.
They buy lettuce from this guy and they buy tomatoes from that girl
week after week. They don’t switch it up.
If you then enter that market as a new vendor, how do you knock
someone out of the preferred vendor spot in a customer’s mind? How
do you get the customer to switch to buying lettuce or tomatoes
from you instead of that guy or that girl? Because that’s
really what you need to do. Either you need to get existing
customers to switch or you need to pick up market share from new
customers. The bad news is that once a person commits to a
particular product or brand in their mind it’s very hard to get
them to switch.
Look no further than you own habits. How often do you go to
different grocery stores or gas stations by your house or how often
do you change brands of laundry detergent or ketchup?
Probably not very often. You made a decision long ago, and as
long as things do change, why switch.
Given that, how do you compete in a crowded farmers market?
Why is a farmer’s market customer going to choose your booth versus
the booth that they always shop at?
You have to be unique..
Again, look at the landscape of the market, if there are already 5
vegetable vendors at your market more or less growing what you
grow, and they are established, then you either have to be unique
enough to go in and compete with them hand try to knock one of them
out of the top 5 in terms of market share, which is hard, or you
have to be unique enough so you don’t actually have to compete
against them. Instead positioning yourself in the customers
mind as the preferred choice.
How do you do that, make yourself unique?
One way is to specialize in something.
Part of that specialization might mean differentiating your product
so you position yourself as the category leader; a category that
you own; one that you create.
For example, say a lot of vendors are selling loose leaf
lettuce. There’s already an established hierarchy there in
terms of market share for the category of loose leaf lettuce.
How do you compete?
You don’t, avoid competition, and you create your own category.
Maybe that category is head lettuce or romaine. Or maybe it’s
organic lettuce. Or living lettuce with the roots still
attached. You differentiate your product just enough to move
it to its own category. Then you become first to market in
that category and have an competitive advantage. That’s a far
cry from going into a competitive market and competing on
price. And when you think about it it wasn’t really that
hard. You didn’t have to create or invent anything new. You
just supplied an in demand product to a market that wanted it, but
didn’t have anyone to buy it from.
That’s one of the many benefits of specializing in a product.
And it’s that benefit and the many others that we will be talking
about today, on The Urban Farmer.
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