Promote. Advertise. Push more. Sell more. Do more. All business owners share an endless drive for market growth. They want sales to appreciate every quarter. Well, that is what running a business sustainably requires – continuous growth.
However, it gets to a point where the market gets saturated – few potential customers are left, oversupply of products or services grows, competition is rifle, and every market player seeks to take market share away from each other to survive a shrinking sales possibility.
When competitors fight dirty in a shrinking market, it is always messy. Everyone at least gets hit. This is what happens in a mature market. A mature market is characterised by declining sales, slow growth, high competition and high saturation, where almost every potential customer has been served. Companies at this point jostle for survival.
Every segment saturates at some points. The role of marketing management at such a point is to try to shore up, sustain or grow sales where customers have their needs amply fulfilled, face considerable buying choices, have become highly sensitive to price, and channels take advantage of oversupply to harass the company or place unreasonable demands.
This is the point where the sales team get jittery, fearing management backlash due to negative returns on investment. The management team also gets bogged down by reduced inflow to meet operational obligations. Those market realities make taking swift remedial action necessary to ensure the situation doesn’t get to the point of impacting overall performance.
Probably you are thinking about what you would do if you found yourself in the situations described above. Drawing from marketing experts, let’s try to proffer useful strategies that can be deployed to get you out of the fix. Here we go:
- Leverage relationship with existing customers to expand usage frequency – Usage situations may not have been fully explored. Ask yourself if it is possible to increase the frequency of use for your product services to increase volume. You may want to draw your client’s attention to new circumstances where the same service or product can provide an advantage. Think about this. Toothpaste makers would like you to brush your teeth morning and night, stating health advantages that you may not have been aware of previously. Guess what happens to buying frequency and sales volume?
- Extend your product line – Species adapt to a changing ecosystem. Taking such wisdom, you should think about creating varieties, formats or sizes of the same product and service to provide existing customers with new options. Jobberman’s recruiting services recently extended to helping people find remote jobs, to support its regular services. The Coca-Cola Company also offers Coke with sugar or aspartame. It is the same Coke with different sweeteners. Soap brands come as liquid and bar forms. You find a clue in that, right?
- Innovate slightly – Never allow the market to get too used to your offering. If you have a goal of consistently introducing something new as part of your offering, existing consumers will feel excited about patronising your products as if they are buying something new. This requires innovation. Meanwhile, innovation doesn’t always have to come in the form of a big tech breakthrough. It could be introducing a new handle or better packaging to help consumers feel comfortable using your products. Now, that feels OK.
- Expand to a new market – The safest approach to beating a saturated market is expanding to a new market, either with the same offering or something new to capture new potential users. A new market is like a virgin land. You may have to educate the consumers and promote widely; the effort will be worth it as long as you get your data right.
