The general maxim of marketing is this; know what your target market want and sell it to them. Following this maxim is an age long business philosophy. The results are unquestionable, it works. Giving people what they want works, because there’s no resistance whatsoever.

You never get to rock the boat. You never have to challenge the existing order. You get what you want, they get what they want, no cause for alarm, everybody wins. This type of marketing is what I call —transactionary marketing.

What Is Transactionary Marketing?

Transactionary marketing is marketing for today. It is all about meeting the wants and needs of the market today. Find a need and fill it. A very typical example is this; selling food to a hungry person. It’s obviously a no brainer. Anyone and everyone can do this, as a matter of fact; very little marketing is even required. Just show up in any location where there are a lot of hungry people. For example, in a school, at a conference venue, around offices or on a busy street.

This type of marketing is built on the premise that your target market sees things or views the world in a particular way and this way of seeing or viewing the world shapes their wants and needs. As a marketer, all you need to do is to see things or view the world from their perspective, simple. This way, you will be able to clearly identify and understand what their immediate wants and needs are. No much effort required, after all if you study them long enough, you will eventually begin to see like they see.

This way of seeing in marketing is known as worldview.

It basically means the perception or the lens through which your target market view and interpret things. For easy comprehension, let’s just call it mindset. Transactionary marketing is all about understanding the mindset of your target market and packaging your offering [product/service] to align with that mindset. It is just like ‘mirror marketing’, simply give back what you see. What you see is what you get kind of marketing. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it kind of marketing.

I wish this were the case 100% of the time, life would have been so sweet right? No! I am glad life isn’t this way all of the time, because of all men we would have been the most miserable. How do I mean?

Worldviews Resist Change And Limit Innovation

Imagine a world where we only get what we want exactly how we want it, wouldn’t that be boring? Imagine a world that lacked innovation, where nothing unexpected happens, where everything is predictable. What a boredom!

The problem with transactionary marketing is that it gives no room for innovation because it focuses on meeting only the wants and needs of today. It’s marketing for the average folks; those who focus on living for today. If all you do is to give the market what they want and need today, then you won’t last long in business. Why? Because soon what the market wants today will soon fade away and tomorrow they will be in pursuit of newer things.

You see, variety they say is the spice of life. Meaning, people will always be in demand of the newest things in town. They will get tired of the old; this is what drives the world of business. If as an entrepreneur you are not creating innovative products/services that meet the wants and needs of tomorrow, then you face the risk of becoming obsolete!

As entrepreneurs, our role is not to preserve the status quo; our role is to challenge it. Entrepreneurs break new grounds, they deliver the future, and they stretch our worldviews. Before the airplane was invented, the general worldview of people was that flying was impossible. It is not the responsibility of the market to change their worldviews; it is the entrepreneurs’ responsibility to.

People over a certain period of time, get bored of getting the same old thing over and over again in the same old way. They won’t make the change until an alternative shows up.  MySpace felt they were the best at social network platforms until Facebook came along and everyone switched. Yahoo mail was the king of email, until Google raised the bar with Gmail.

Revolutionary Marketing: The NEED For CHANGE!

Revolutionary marketing is the marketing for change. This is marketing that challenges the status quo. It involves raising the bar and going beyond what people want to buy today to giving them what they need to buy tomorrow. It is marketing not for a product or service alone, but for the advancement of a cause, an idea, a new way of living; a change of worldview. The objective is not just to make the sale, but to make a difference, to make change happen!

The very essence of life is advancement, growth, change. Meaning, things will never be the same. The market knows this, but they rely on entrepreneurs to make the needed change happen. They rely on entrepreneurs to advance the course of humanity by delivering the impossible. The market knows what they want today, but rarely do they know what they will need tomorrow.

As humans what we want may not always be what we need. The natural being we are makes it hard for us to want what will cause us to change. The truth is, we want things to remain the same, especially those things that we enjoy. But history has proved time and again that change is the only thing that moves humanity forward.

Revolutionary marketing is built on the ground breaking concept of Blue Ocean Strategy; go where profits and growth are and where the competition isn’t.

The Blue Ocean Strategy is based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than 100 years and 30 industries, authors Kim and Mauborgne argue that tomorrow’s leading companies will succeed not by battling competitors, but by creating “blue oceans” of uncontested market space ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—termed “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value for both the firm and its buyers, rendering rivals obsolete and unleashing new demand.

The 5 principles of the Blue Ocean Strategy:

• Create Uncontested Market Space
• Make The Competition Irrelevant
• Create And Capture New Demand
• Break The Value-Cost Trade-Off
• Align The Whole System Of A Company’s Activities In Pursuit Of Differentiation And Low Cost

Only Unusual Entrepreneurs Deliver The Future

Revolutionary marketing is marketing for the future. It is marketing for tomorrow not today. Unusual entrepreneurs who change the world do so through revolutionary marketing. Steve Jobs made Apple into what it is today through revolutionary marketing. Bill Gates changed the course of history when he took the computer and made it personal for every individual to own one. People were already satisfied with the mainframe computers, they didn’t ask for more but when they saw more, they wondered how they had lived with less.

Innovation doesn’t come from just meeting the wants of the market today, it comes from exceeding it by addressing their needs tomorrow. Selling the obvious won’t keep you in the market for long. Revolutionary marketing is seeing beyond the obvious. The world was satisfied with analog cameras until digital cameras showed up. When Sony launched their mobile compact disc player, the Walkman, no one asked for it. But when it hit the market, people wondered how they had been living without it.

But how come the market rarely wants to change? Because it doesn’t require courage to follow the norm. Change is scary and people don’t like to be scared. They prefer to stick with what they have always known. People don’t want to buy change because it demands a change of their worldviews. As a matter of fact, they don’t even know how to change their worldviews, that’s why unusual entrepreneurs exist.

Thank God for unusual entrepreneurs who are courageous enough to push the boundaries of mediocrity. Thank God they dare to be more, to do more and give more than what the world ever asked for. Thank God they are not driven by what the market wants alone, but also by what they know will make a difference. These unusual ones are driven by change and not the laws of demand and supply. And because they do, they end up creating a market for themselves!

Unusual Entrepreneurs deliver change. Unusual Entrepreneurs make ideas happen. Unusual Entrepreneurs deliver the future. Unusual entrepreneurs are the causes of market revolutions. Unusual entrepreneurs disrupt the existing order, status quo, norm and traditional ways of  doing things . They are not going into business to do it like others have been doing it, they raise the bar. They take the market to another level. They take the industry further; they give more than the market wants.

Why?

Because only those who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, eventually do so!

What Next?

Now that you’ve identified the difference between transactionary marketing and revolutionary marketing, so how do you put it to work? This is going to be the focus of the next unusual article in this series. I strongly recommend you sign up with the form below to ensure you don’t miss out on the preceding parts of this series.

Also, I am counting on your comments about this concept of revolutionary marketing. What’s your own take on it? How valid do you think it applies in the real world? What other examples further validates it or negates it?

Share your thoughts in the comment section below, thanks for reading!