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Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality
Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality

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Session 4: Customers and markets

Introduction

Who is going to buy your offering and why should they? In this session your thinking will turn to how you make your idea happen, and towards your customers.

Taken together, customers, markets and competitors are considered the domain of marketing. Marketing is a broad area and to paraphrase business guru, Peter Drucker, any enterprise is a mix of innovation and marketing. This means addressing questions that arose in your business model from Session 3 – who is going to buy this? How do I communicate the benefits? How much will they pay for it?

The approach taken in this course is to recognise that examining the relationship between what you offer and what people might find useful touches on every part of an organisation’s operations. You will also identify that marketing for an established business (which may be about maintaining market share, or launching new products) is quite a different prospect from marketing for a new business.

By the end of this session, you will be able to:

  • identify the customers that your business is aimed at
  • describe in detail the market you are competing in
  • define who you think you will be competing with.