TPO

Doing part-time job these days I don't have much energy and time to do anything else. Wow it's almost December.

Before talking about what kind people I'm targeting, I think I should tell where in the world I've got the idea of marketing. It's from a book published in Japan, "Ureru Kaisha no Sugoi Shikumi (Amazing scheme of successful company) by Yoshinori Sato". You might understand why Starbucks is doing well and others are not so well if you read this.

Anyway, back to people. Why do they buy stuff? They buy because they want the products/services or can't live without them (, or those goods or whatever are close enough to what they want.) So there are millions of reasons why the products/services are chosen.

For example (from Mr. Sato's mail magazine), let's see a case of a circus group called "Cirque de Soleil". It's a Montreal-based circus and quite famous in Japan. There are many reason to go, like "I heard it was fun, we should try once", "they say it's good for a date event", "it must be nice to take the children and show art", etc. etc.  The circus itself is always the same during the period, yet people come to it with different reason and that's the key.

According to Mr. Sato's research the circus's customer can be divided into three segments; A: Couple like boyfriend/girlfriend or husband/wife (or whatever), B: Friends, C: Family. Clearly they must have different reasons or the TPO (time, place, occasion) to go. People in A: couple segment mostly use it in the weekend evening as a date event, People in B: Friend segment use it in the weekend afternoon and weekday evening for leisure. People in C: Family use it in the weekend afternoon for leisure plus sort of education and as a reunion event.
(If you're a  PR office member of the circus, now you know what kind message you should put in a certain media.)

What I wanted to say here is NOT that I want to be PR manager of the circus, but you can find out and sort out those reasons of certain people by TPO. Then you should think the most effective messages for certain type of people. (Here the message can be replaced by design of your products.)

The biggest mistake I made at the Toronto show in this summer was we didn't provide any questionnaire for research. So anyone who's thinking of planning a show or applying for a show, you better off make appropriate questionnaire. Even the number of the answer is ten, there's truth in the ten piece of paper.

Well, back to my target/demand. If there are ten different needs for chair, why not attend to the ten needs with ten different design? I'm not a great designer, my chair won't be able to attend to many needs, like Hans J Wegner's Y chair (or the circus). Though I didn't start as a designer, and I have NO interest in creating single great design, I don't have sense of shame of designing very coherent products. (After all, there won't be much variation as long as I use wood.) I don't know how to name my target, here I just say custom needs.

All I learned at the school was to make only one cabinet/chair in the world. I think that's quite a strength to get "my" customer. I just use the skill to make only one stuff for people, not me.

In the next post, I want to write about basic of "BASiCS".