MKT.1 - Qualify a Market Problem and Differences between Customers

Type: Marketing Method pattern Status: Stable

MKT.1:1 - Problem frame

Use this pattern when a team must decide whose difficulty to address, which customers can reasonably receive the same offer, or whether an apparent market opportunity warrants further work. Start with a concrete activity and the people whose conditions can change the offer. A list of organisations or a demographic description is useful only insofar as it helps locate those conditions.

The first useful result is a bounded market hypothesis: a worthwhile customer difficulty, the relevant roles and circumstances, consequential differences between cases, and a justified next commercial move or inquiry. It can support a small offer test without claiming the size or permanence of a market.

The intended reader knows the subject service or product and can obtain qualified accounts of customer work and feasible supply. No prior command of segmentation terminology is required. If the difficulty is already understood for a known customer and a suitable offer exists, proceed directly to adapting the offer or arranging acquisition. Reconstructing an entire market would add no useful answer.

MKT.1:2 - Problem

“The customer” can name a legal organisation, the person doing the work, a purchaser, a payer or an access authority. Treating them as one actor can produce an attractive offer that nobody can use or obtain. Grouping customers by an easy-to-find attribute can conceal the difference that determines usefulness; dividing every person into a unique group can make a reusable offer impossible.

Qualify the difficulty and group cases only around differences that change a useful decision. Keep the grounds and limits of that grouping available when selecting customers, constructing an offer or revising the market hypothesis.

MKT.1:3 - Forces

MKT.1:4 - Solution

MKT.1:4.1 - Recover the difficulty without selecting the answer in advance

Name the activity, the inadequate or unavailable result, the circumstances in which it matters and what presently happens instead. Use an actual account or an explicitly proposed case. “Need our platform” is a proposed answer. “A reporting operator must re-enter the same permitted data before the deadline” is a difficulty whose remedy remains open.

Ask what would make addressing it worthwhile and for whom. Consider the result, transition effort, continuing burden and effects on people who do not make the purchasing decision. Use DOCA.3 when the worthwhile problem or proposed contribution itself remains unresolved. It can return a supported problem, an attributed value claim, a hypothesis or rejection. Marketing must preserve that strength instead of treating every lead as established demand.

The scope must be large enough to retain the result and small enough to investigate. Separate performing the underlying work from finding and acquiring a means to perform it. A purchasing obstacle can coexist with a well-served operational activity; an urgent operational need can coexist with no attainable purchase.

MKT.1:4.2 - Recover the roles and the alternatives available to each

Identify the people or groups that perform, choose, pay, permit, maintain and are materially affected. Record only distinctions that change the present question. One person may perform several roles. One organisation may contain several independent opportunities; its name is not a single goal or purchasing state.

For each consequential role, ask what useful result or protection matters, what effort or exposure it would accept, what it can decide, and what it would do without this proposal. Verify an attributed authority when the next action relies on it. A friendly contact may supply insight while having no ability to commit a budget or permit access.

Compare feasible alternatives, including continuing the present way, using internal assistance, another supplier, a smaller change or deferring the task. This exposes the relevant competition for the proposed contribution. An internally impressive capability is commercially irrelevant if the people can obtain the needed result more suitably elsewhere.

Use MKT.12 for the missing answer. Its result-investigation route can establish differences in desired execution outcomes; its choice-history route can explain a particular transition. Keep each result’s activity coverage, uncertainty and population limits. When an unresolved omitted outcome could change the proposed grouping or contribution, obtain that answer or narrow the target hypothesis before relying on the comparison.

MKT.1:4.3 - Construct and challenge useful groupings

Place concrete cases side by side. Ask whether the same contribution would address their difficulty under compatible conditions. Compare the activity, desired result, available alternative, access, preparation, buying arrangement and supply constraints. Keep a distinction only when it changes the offer, evidence needed, way to reach the people, acquisition route or capacity to supply.

Propose a group in terms that make inclusion and exclusion intelligible. For example, “teams using compatible files for a periodic report, with permission for a bounded export and an operator available to inspect it” gives a testable use boundary. “Mid-sized innovative organisations” may help locate candidates but does not supply those conditions.

Look for a nearby case that would break the shared offer. If a similar organisation needs continuous integration rather than a periodic file exchange, decide whether it needs a different variant, a separate target group or no current offer. Do not widen the original group’s meaning to retain every attractive lead. Conversely, a different industry need not require another group when the action-changing conditions really match.

Keep the observed cases, the hypothesis about a wider group and the estimate of its extent separate. A handful of cases can justify the next limited test while leaving the latter two uncertain. Larger population, pricing or investment decisions may require a different inquiry. A statistical cluster also needs an interpretable difference that a real offer or action can address.

MKT.1:4.4 - Select a target and a bounded next move

Compare plausible groups under the same intended investment and horizon. Ask how important and poorly served the result appears, how the relevant people can be reached, which alternative must be improved upon, whether the contribution can be supplied, and what learning or preparation it needs. Include the cost of discovering and serving the group as well as attracting it.

A material unknown is a reason for a bounded inquiry when its answer could change the choice. It is not automatically a zero value, a high score or grounds for rejecting a genuine customer problem. Where criteria conflict, state the trade-off: a small reachable group may be preferable for a trial, while a larger group with unresolved delivery conditions remains a later hypothesis. Do not hide a necessary condition inside an average score.

Select one of the live results:

• construct or test an offer for a supported group and stated use;
• obtain a specified missing answer before selecting the group;
• change the proposed contribution or obtain a missing supplier;
• retain the lead as a hypothesis with a return condition; or
• stop because the relevant problem, attainable improvement or commercial contribution is not supported.

There is no obligation to maximise the number of groups or pursue every worthwhile difficulty. Respect an existing adequate solution when further differentiation would not change the action.

MKT.1:4.5 - Carry the hypothesis into an offer and keep its conditions live

Give MKT.2 the relevant roles, activity, contribution, actual alternatives, inclusion conditions and uncertainties. That method constructs the specific offer and positioning. Give MKT.4 the separate buying or transition difficulty rather than assuming that operational usefulness makes acquisition easy.

For example, the working result can say: “For teams with compatible periodic exports and an available reviewer, a bounded file-mapping trial could reduce duplicate entry. Access approval and the customer’s purchasing window remain separate conditions. Continuous integration cases need another supply arrangement. The next move is to verify those conditions with two candidate teams before quoting the trial.”

While identifying a missing access condition, the marketer is already doing part of the larger offer-construction work: the condition limits what may be proposed. If the encompassing programme reduces its support capacity, revisit the groups that require that support. If a customer changes its purchasing procedure, revise that acquisition route without automatically discarding the evidence about its underlying activity.

Reopen the affected hypothesis when the activity, relevant roles, feasible alternative, supply arrangement or evidence of an important difference changes. Preserve unrelated qualified cases. A group is a maintained decision aid whose utility depends on its conditions, not an identity imposed on its members.

MKT.1:5 - Archetypal Grounding

MKT.1:5.1 - Three organisations, four opportunities

In a stipulated case, a file-transfer supplier considers Sever, Vector and Luch. Sever’s reporting department and Vector use compatible periodic files; Sever’s production department and Luch need continuous integration. The supplier has an existing file-transfer operation but no suitable continuous integration service.

The initial “three similar businesses” list cannot select an offer. The marketer recovers four activities and their roles. Reporting operators care about repeated entry and preserving an inspection step; purchasing staff care about expenditure and timing; access staff need an acceptable data arrangement. Sever’s two departments cannot be assigned one condition merely because they share an organisation name.

The first target hypothesis groups the two compatible reporting opportunities for a bounded trial. Each retains separate access and purchasing conditions. The two continuous integration opportunities remain worthwhile problem hypotheses with missing supply. They are not counted as file-trial demand. MKT.2 receives enough to construct the reporting offer; MKT.4 receives Vector’s later purchasing window as a distinct issue.

MKT.1:5.2 - A change that splits one use without erasing the rest

Suppose Vector can no longer export the required data. Its original inclusion condition fails. Ask whether a permitted local variant or another supplier can still supply the result. Retain Sever’s supported reporting case; a changed rule at Vector does not establish that all periodic reporting customers are unsuitable.

In a consumer repair service, one person may choose, pay and use the result. The role account then becomes smaller. Two otherwise similar households can still need different offers because one can wait and the other must restore an essential activity today. The discriminating condition is useful even when demographic descriptions are identical.

MKT.1:6 - Bias-Annotation

A successful reference customer can become an unjustified model for everyone. Inspect both the conditions that enabled the success and a nearby case that lacks them. A sales database also contains the people the organisation happened to reach; it need not represent those who stayed with another solution or could not get access.

Descriptive categories can become stereotypes when inferred characteristics replace actual evidence. Use a category to locate a question, and confirm the condition before relying on it for a consequential individual offer.

MKT.1:7 - Conformance Checklist

• The difficulty and desired result are distinct from the proposed product or technology.
• Action-changing roles, available alternatives and authority conditions remain separate.
• Grouping has an intelligible use condition and an exclusion or revision case.
• Observed cases, a wider group hypothesis and a population estimate retain different evidence strength.
• Target choice includes reachability, supply and full relevant burden under a declared horizon.
• The result gives an offer, inquiry, supplier request, qualified deferral or stop a usable starting point.

MKT.1:8 - Common Anti-Patterns and How to Avoid Them

MKT.1:9 - Consequences

The team can pursue a smaller justified opportunity while retaining other problems and unknowns honestly. It can also discover that the proposed supplier is a poor fit even when a customer difficulty is real. Maintaining useful group boundaries costs inquiry and revision; creating distinctions that never change action adds expense without a marketing gain.

MKT.1:10 - Architectural Rationale

Problem, roles, alternatives and grouping are joined because each constrains the target that an offer can reasonably address. A broad strategy can identify a promising direction, and an exchange method can construct one deal. Neither alone explains how repeated differences among customers should guide a market hypothesis and several offers.

Grouping is conditional reuse: it permits a common starting contribution while preserving consequential differences. Selecting a group does not yet organise a multi-organisation programme; MKT.14 supplies that larger choice of preparation, coordination and investment.

MKT.1:11 - SoTA-Echoing

For finding distinctions that change an offer, adapt Strategyn’s public ODI account: executor, activity and differing poorly served results can reveal groups that a product list or demographic label conceals. Its useful contribution is the question-relative grouping in §4.3. The serious lighter alternative is an existing descriptive segment that already locates the decisive conditions. Retain that simpler grouping when it works; the additional inquiry must change selection or supply. Do not adopt permanent segment stability, exhaustive need coverage or a supplier’s success rates. Reopen when the proposed common offer fails in a consequential included case.

For qualifying the underlying opportunity, adopt DOCA.3’s distinction between a supported problem, value claim and unconfirmed hypothesis, and adapt ECO.3’s comparison with each party’s alternative. These developed internal treatments improve §§4.1–4.4 over assuming that one favourable contact establishes an organisation’s demand. They preserve modest ordinary accounts while making an unsupported commercial leap visible; they do not supply market prevalence.

MKT.1:12 - Relations

MKT.12 supplies question-specific evidence and receives unresolved differences. MKT.2 constructs the offer for the qualified situation. MKT.4 develops feasible choice and acquisition. A failed offer or transition can reveal a missing group distinction and return here.

DOCA.3 and Strategy supply worthwhile problems and possible contributions; their results retain their own conditions. MKT.13 asks whether the commercial arrangement can repeat at another volume. MKT.14 uses this market hypothesis when selecting named organisations and arranging common or individual work; membership alone does not supply that programme.

MKT.1:End