16. Entrepreneurial Marketing

Firms often create products (and services) based on radically new technology. These new products have the power to change the marketplace, but still fail relatively often. While entrepreneurs typically focus on the unique features of a new product, end users are generally more interested in the solution it offers and/or whether it is easy to integrate in their business processes. Furthermore, if the product is radically new, potential customers will probably struggle to understand the new product, and hence, they need to be educated before they consider adopting the new product. Consequently, the marketing and sales for radically new products are complicated and differ from traditional marketing and selling that are more geared towards incremental innovation. In this chapter, we define the concepts of entrepreneurial marketing and sales, explain their differences, and discuss why the new product development process of young firms should be complemented with a customer development process. Before a young firm can grow, customers need to be discovered and built. Later, marketing and sales efforts can be optimized using data collected from the firm’s initial customer base. Modifications to traditional marketing concepts, such as segmentation and positioning, and to common marketing instruments are discussed.