The number of HDMI dongles you can sell is almost directly correlated to the number of computers there are, you might be lucky and find that in some cases a single user with one laptop might need 2 or even 3 dongles, but generally, its going to be 1 dongle for every laptop. You see this quite commonly, the market for the product is conditional on the adaptation of another product, surf wax and surfboards, rollerblade bags and rollerblades. These sub-products cater for a niche, which is a strong strategy if the niche is growing, but may not be a permanent strategy.
This was the situation one of the companies I’m working with found themselves in, their customers were companies that product video content, which basically meant if the companies decided to not produce videos, this startup i was working with would find the bottom fall out of their bucket. There was literally nothing they could do to influenced more usage of their product since it was directly correlational to the video production capacity.
The dilemma was startups survive on reliable, growing, recurring revenue, so they needed to figure out a way to get not just customers, but also have the existing customers use their product more often, and for longer.
This is a case for inception.
Theres a famous marketing story about a guy named Edward Bernays, who was a pioneer in modern propaganda, specifically, he was famous for a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist “Torches of Freedom”, the idea was the piggy back the suffragette movement to expand the market share of cigarette smokers to expand into the fairer gender.
This case is one of the keys in the wider approach to expanding a market, and particularly useful in this case of a startups who’s entire business is dependant on the wider adaptation of video production as a medium.
The focus of this inception marketing was therefore to leverage content marketing as a way to encourage the clients to produce more videos, the startup would do this by highlighting and promoting the success and value of video as a medium, thereby increasing the size of their marketing.