Watch your Market

July 24th, 2008 at 05:19pm Bill Swick

As we’ve said before, a big part of marketing is listening to your customers and giving them what they want. But you should also keep in mind that markets can change; and your customers’ minds may change faster than your product can.

Look at Ford. The Detroit giant has coasted for years as maker of the top-selling F-150 pickup truck. In fact, they were just about ready to release a new-fangled version of their gas-guzzling money maker. Bringing a vehicle to the market takes years of development and while Ford was redesigning its truck, oil prices were steadily climbing.

Now the product that Ford has banked on has lost a lot of its appeal in the market. The result has been loss after loss. In fact, much of the American auto industry is feeling the same pains as Ford.

Who can blame them? On paper, they’ve been feeding the public’s hunger for fuel-thirsty trucks and SUVs – and succeeding. People were buying their products. The problem is that everyone kept asking how high gas prices would have to get before people stopped buying big vehicles.

Apparently that number was somewhere around $4 a gallon and now manufacturers are left with big vehicles that aren’t selling and they are hemorrhaging money on a monumental scale.

The moral is that no amount of marketing will overcome anything that outlives its product cycle. If an industry is changing, past successes may not be enough to ensure your future. Keeping a watchful eye on your market and if change looks inevitable, don’t wait until it’s too late to do anything but just react.

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