Do your values matter?

Our values are drawn from ourselves and our culture. A well defined set of values could be a "moral code". Do these matter in business and more specifically marketing?

There is a sweet point for your business - where your market opportunity matches some of your values and some of your resources.

Some of your values will not match your resources and some of your values will not match your market opportunity.

For instance someone with strong religious beliefs may find that including all of their beliefs does get an amount of business. Religions are networks and this may have a good or a not so good match with the market.

Having the religious beliefs in the first place has little to do with business, but the decision of including it as a focal part of how you target people in your market is.

The difficulty with values are that they are very personal. It is therefore difficult to make decisions about which personal values are and which are not included in your business. Without values your business may lack personality. If you choose the values that the largest part of the market has - but you do not actually share in, then you may appear false.

Some individuals have issues with including some of their values but ignoring others. A selective moral code may be dangerous, but this is a business, not an individual.

Plugging into your market is not just about market analysis. It is also about people and how they can be involved in taking the opportunity to market.

Don't Operate In The Dark - Plug In To Your Market NOW

Have you ever tried to plug in a lamp in the dark? You grab the plug and then thrust your hand towards the wall. Maybe you find the socket but by then you have scraped away a strip of wallpaper and you are getting increasingly anxious as you try to fit the three pins of the plug into the three holes that you know are there. Darkness ensures that the orientation of the plug is pure guesswork. You know it should all fit but somehow it does not.

This is not unlike the approach taken by many small businesses to the markets that they operate in. They have great products or services which they just KNOW will be bought by people. Somehow business just has not been booming - why?

The marketplace is huge so you need to focus quite a bit. What area of the market should you be aiming at, how do you identify it, what resources do you need to exploit it? If you can identify this niche clearly (think of being able to use a torch in the lamp example above), and you have the right product or service (think compatible plug and socket) then you are almost there. You still might need some help in actually delivering but the guesswork has gone and you can actually focus on making money.