Desire or Solution- what's your market type?

It's critical to understand the difference between what people want and how they get it. Our desires are usually the same, but the means of achieving them change. For example, the need to maintain good oral hygiene can be met in a variety of ways, including toothbrushes, mouthwash, and even crunchy foods like carrots, which clean the mouth as we chew.

People are more concerned with their desires than with how they are now achieving them. If a better way to satisfy their need becomes available, they will quickly switch. This is why new startups are displacing long-established incumbents. People do not have a strong attachment to solutions.

Because there are so many other methods to satisfy a demand, an established toothbrush firm doesn't have to compete just with other toothbrush companies. It must also compete with all other methods of maintaining healthy dental hygiene (such as mouthwash and people chewing carrots). This is fantastic news for business owners since it means that no market will ever be saturated.

People took care of their oral hygiene long before toothbrushes were invented, and they will continue to do so long after toothbrushes are obsolete.

Because aspirations never go away, better solutions can always take their place.

Let's take a look at a couple more scenarios. Our need for music has never waned, but the means by which we can satisfy it have changed throughout time, from live orchestras to vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, MP3 devices, and now streaming services like Spotify. Similarly, our hunger for information has never changed; the only difference is that we've stopped visiting to libraries or reading through the Yellow Pages and instead begun Googling. Even Googling may cease to exist tomorrow, yet our insatiable desire for knowledge will endure.

Entrepreneurs like to claim that their products are one-of-a-kind in the market and that they have no competitors. That is not the case. People do not wait for the perfect solution to appear on the market. They frequently use one or many methods to satisfy their cravings. You may not recognise it as a rival or believe that what others are using is ideal or desirable, but it exists and being used. Because individuals used the Yellow Pages to locate information, the first search engine had to compete with it.

All new things compete with old things, no matter how unique they are.

As a result, as an entrepreneur, you must be clear about what human demand you are attempting to satisfy and what existing options exist for the client to satisfy that desire. Despite the fact that CRM software and Microsoft Excel appear to serve separate markets, they compete head-to-head in terms of desires since they both fulfil the same desire of business owners to keep track of their clients.