tJP

This recently happened to MapData Sciences when Google Maps rocked their world( but legitimised the market), so what did they do and did they thrive?

MapData seems to have done two key things:

• Get Specialised
• Get Vertical

In the specialised application of mapping they have driven into areas such as customer service. Applications include a better dealer locator  in this Toro example, and then a health application for cancer customers.

In the Vertical space they have moved into Transport with truck route optimisation, with a neat Government angle too where compliance is a side benefit. Both are good examples of where a ’small company’ can go to add value and defend a niche.  

A similar question may be asked of what Amazon will do with Kindle now the Apple iPad Gorilla descended.

When marketing and selling to business a common belief is that only problems get investment. Managers will likely spend much more time and effort fixing problems than developing new ideas. So the key is ‘Make and cultivate problems’.

Its not the same case in consumer marketing, on first view. Reviewing a few of the hot current applications, products I think that some truly hot products do fix some problems:

Twitter - as SMS and IM traffic increased, its becomes harder to keep multiple conversations going, especially if moving from PC to mobile -  so Twitter is useful as you can broadcast yet keep direct communications with key people. I also find it useful as a source of interesting subjects to read.

Chomp - a brand new iPhone application that helps to evaluate, rank and rate other iPhone applications - the problem is the 100,000 apps on the market and working out the good, the bad and the ugly. Co-founder is Ben Keighran of BluePulse.

FourSquare - is application that lets you tell people where you are, from your phone. As we communicate while mobile, want to share our location. Funnily enough, this was where BluePulse was 5 years ago - maybe the time was not right, because the problem wasn’t there?

Kindle - makes buying, carrying and reading a selection of books really easy.

Google Search - other Search engines( Yahoo!, Alta Vista) were not providing us the information we wanted.

MS Office - while Word and WordPerfect competed, as did Excel and Lotus 123, Office had the field open to it. The problem was a new set of non technical users who wanted a common set of commands and menus.

These are examples of successful products( Chomp is to new ) and they do seem to fix a problem.

In addition, they are NOT “better mousetrap” products eg Bing vs Google, which will be long drawn out battle.

So, if you have a new product for market, and want it to be a success, keep on innovating and work out the key problem it fixes.

Have any examples, please add them.