The challenge of going direct to your final customer to market your product

Sometimes going direct to your final customers could be extremely challenging, especially if you are looking to establish your product as the industry standard. Persuading all those various customers to accept your product becomes impossible simply because they would all need to agree in the same time - and each one (not unnaturally) is likely to say that they will agree provided all of the other people do.

Many firms finish up trusting to luck and persuasive promotion, as was the case with Betamax and VHS (the competing house video systems) in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately VHS won the battle, although Betamax was, in numerous ways, technically superior. Far better is to find out who will influence (or insist on) other companies adopting the product as standard.

In 1868, George Westinghouse invented the air brake. This was an essential development, because railroads had been spreading throughout America and indeed the rest of the world.

Railroad trains are easy to begin, but challenging to quit - if the braking only happens in the locomotive end of the train, the carriages will derail, and (for a lengthy train) exactly the same applies if braking is applied only in the end of the train. For safety, braking needs to be applied along the length of the train, and systems of levers or cables are just not fast-acting enough.

Westinghouse's system needed to be adopted across all the rail companies, nevertheless, since each carriage or freight automobile might be carried across a number of various rail companies' tracks in its progress across America.

This meant that each piece of rolling stock might be connected to any other company's stock, including the brake systems. But how to persuade several dozen businesses to adopt the new system?

Westinghouse examined the routings of railroads across the nation to see where the main nexus of rail transport was. This turned out to be Chicago, where rail links from the West and also the prairies brought cattle towards the slaughterhouses, and rail links towards the Eastern cities carried the meat towards the tables of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Exactly the same links moved manufactured goods from the East to the new towns and ranches in the West.

The Burlington Railroad was the business that had opened up the West, operating trains across the prairies: if Burlington accepted the new system, Eastern railways would have to go along as well, or would have to unload and reload boxcars in Chicago.

After running a series of demonstrations, Westinghouse persuaded Burlington to adopt the system - thus forcing every other railroad operator in America to do the same. Numerous engineers still think that the vacuum brake is superior to Westinghouse's air brake, simply because it responds faster - Westinghouse's good results came from becoming the industry regular.

Make sure you've identified the real crucial account. Be prepared to provide concessions if essential - the key account is likely to know that they're the crucial to your good results, and will negotiate strongly. All your eggs are in one basket - don't drop the basket! A superior product, of itself, is not sufficient: even an inferior product will succeed if it becomes the regular.

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The challenge of going direct to your final customer to market your product

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