I woke up out of a dream this morning saying "Smoldering Markets".
I don't normally post about my dreams (otherwise mynameiskate would be filled with camp counselors, missed deadlines and Neopets), but this seemed important. It's what we're all looking for: smoldering markets. Markets that are probably relatively small, but with a lot of potential power; they are gathering energy, starting to smoke and are waiting for the right product to burst them into flame. They may be short-lived, or they may ignight into an inferno. How do we find them and throw the right kindling (marketing? conversation?) onto the pile?
One of the many half-finished books on my "to read" shelf is Neil Gershenfeld's Fab: the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication, a book, in part, about individuals being their own market-of-one and designing/manufacturing products for themselves with the help of service providers who do all the heavy-lifting. Clive Thompson also wrote about this phenomenon (the "fab lab") in a recent issue of Wired.
This is one way to identify these smoldering markets. Talk to manufacturing service providers like eMachineShop and see what trends they are experiencing. What are the material demands they are seeing? Are there colours/fabrics/textures that are popular? Or, more importantly, are there designs that people are trying, but they can't quite get right because they are not professionals. Could your company lend some expertise?
Smoldering markets will likely never be mass markets. It is no longer Henry Ford's world. It's a world that allows an individual's vision to come to fruition. It's one step beyond customization, beyond choosing from a pre-defined set of options. It is about harnassing the creativity and individuality of customers to help them actualize something that only exists in their imagination.
This role of actualizer is a perfect one for corporations to play. Businesses have access to economies of scale that an individual doesn't currently have. Businesses also have access to a level of expertise that individuals would likely pay to use.