Profitable Niches

Roland Thomas (Moldflow CEO) told me: “the more the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) market consolidation leads to standardized software, the more opportunities will come for profitable niches to be exploited”.

E-Xstream makes a software that calculates the behaviour of composite materials, like plastics reinforced with glass fibers. The opportunity for E-Xstream came from the multi-phase nature of composite materials. The software Digimat they produce calculates the physical properties of the material to be used for further calculations.

This is an example of what Roland predicted.

Occasional Marketers

Citizen marketers are customers who generate media on behalf of companies. They can either promote good things or call out bad things about your product.

Unsatisfied clients rarely send negative feedback to companies, they leave them across the internet. The majority of consumers fail to provide that feedback because of contact barriers, or lack of responders.

Citizen marketers could be turned into an opportunity for the company, if identified in advance on the early stage of the sales process. Companies should better identify the customers who have their own web site. Networkers and social media users should be enrolled as occasional marketers.