Feel The Pulse Of Your Market

Every country, every separate region, every consumer sector, every location and every little town has a market pulse.  If business owners had the ability to travel, for a complete month, into different market regions...they would discover how different the market pulse is in each area they tried.  Feeling the "pulse" in different markets is an art.  Business owners who perform this duty well are owners with an artistic touch.  Knowing what to buy and when to buy it for resale is no easy task.  Marketing the pulse of your particular region is truly an art form.

Some products are tried and true sellers in any market.  Some products are occasional winners in most markets.  The real trick is to move products well where the market reads are difficult to know unless you have experience moving products in that region.  A good deal of the art to knowing what will move and what will not is to have a lot of regional experience in your particular market area.

Many business owners work hard on studying the demographics of a particular area.  Others pull up a gob of data materials reflecting the previous patterns of product sales for that region.  Some owners rely on examining media movements to determine the timeliness of trends and consumer fashion changes.  Then there are a few owners who possess the skill of an artist and actually "feel" their way into new marketing changes that work well for their businesses.  Whatever the case, every market region has completely different driving segments that move the consumer demands in the fashion they desire.  Business owners must accept this game as part of their ownership responsibility.  Owners have the duty to "feel the pulse of their market."  How do they know when they are hitting that pulse correctly?

When do you know what to sell?  Maybe knowing what to sell is not as difficult to do as knowing what not to sell.  Our inventories are filled with products that we should never have tried.  Many of those items we cannot sell are more personal in nature than we care to admit.  Knowing what not to sell is more important than guessing what will eventually move and work.  The art in feeling the pulse gets muddied when we get personal.

In my business career I have traveled to different regions to manage my business affairs.  I have noticed a significant difference in consumer demand from one market to another.  No market is exactly the same as the other.  Every region has its own pulse.  Every product category has its own feel for what sells well and what does not.

Many business owners have some preferences they personally like to be around.  Everyone has preferences.  I have learned not to buy and try to resale my personal preferences to the marketplace.  My retail sales do poorly with products that please my personal desire.  Many small businesses are born with this premise of mind.  Someone personally likes the cookies they make so well they eventually convince themselves to convert their love of that cookie into a business.  This is a mistake in marketing.  The start-up cookie business that does well is the one that others convince the maker into doing their cookies as a business.  When the market says yes, the start-up will do fine.

There is a big difference in marketing what we like to own and do versus what others like to own and do.  Just because I like sour cream raisin cookies does not mean a gob of others will like them, too.  Furthermore, just because I make sour cream raisin cookies very well does not mean the market will appreciate them as much as I do.  Marketing the pulse is never about reading my personal pulse or desires.  My pulse does not always line up with the pulse of the mass.  Feeling the pulse of the market is reading the art between the difference between what we like to sell versus what the consumer likes to buy.  Sometimes that difference is a very fine line and difficult to identify.  Other times that difference is a huge gap.  Knowing this truth can go a long way in helping an owner to find better ways to read the pulse of their market demands.  When we choose products to sell that are somewhat similar to what the market prefers, and we like those products very much ourselves, our sales will be fair enough for us to believe we have a good pulse on what to buy for resale.  In this case, our pulse is very close to being parallel to the market demand.

Not One Of My Desires

The trouble with this type of marketing effort is that we will not always be running our personal preferences in tandem well with the market we serve.  More than not, we will be off the mark when we begin to buy all of the things we personally like.  Our business model may be doomed if we continue to practice this method of "feeling the pulse" of our market demands.  Some of my best marketing victories came from products I would never buy.  I have sold a ton of baseball cap "clip-on-the-bill" LED flashlights.  I have never bought one nor would I own one.  However, I have made a lot of money marketing them.  I cannot stand the taste of Apples and Cot-lets, but billions have been sold.  Make sure you get a read on feeling the pulse of your market better than the personal desires you carry from within.  You can sell a gob of products you would never buy, yet the market finds them worthwhile.


All in all, get a good read on how your market behaves.  Look at the previous sales numbers and trends.  Look at the region where you live and pay close attention to what moves consumers and what does not.  If you have a sales clerk or an employee who sees better than you on what consumers like to buy in your region, delegate your product buying to that person.  Pay them more, give them some guidelines for buying products for resale and hold them accountable for the process of buying they learn to perform.

Good luck learning how to "feel the pulse" of your market area.

Until next time...