A Simple Way to Increase Demand: Provide a Good Product and Work Hard

Anyone can talk about marketing and growing demand for a product or service.  Many marketers, usually when trying to sell their own marketing system, in essence “their” product, will talk about a formula that will magically increase demand. What most marketers fail to mention is just how much work actually goes into generating demand.

Increasing demand is actually very simple.  It takes having a good product to sell and lots of hard work. 

Demand for a product or service depends intrinsically on its value to any potential customers.  If a product or service is of no use to anyone, no amount of advertising or marketing will make it sell. 

That said, there’s also no accounting for a person’s tastes.  People like different stuff, and that’s the joy of marketing: finding out which people want what. Some people enjoy vanilla while others like chocolate. Some people delight in eating fish eggs.  Some people get a thrill from jumping off high bridges attached to rubber bands.

Whatever product or service you are trying to sell, make it the best it can be and you’ll find that demand for it will grow. Keep working at it, and your customers will help you by spreading the word about it.  Word of mouth marketing is in many ways the best marketing tool there is, and all it takes is having satisfied customers.

These days, the Internet can spread the word about a product in an instant. Look at Jibbitz, which latched on to the Croc shoe craze by providing decorations that allowed Croc customers to make their shoes unique.  They started online, and most of their marketing was via the Internet.  

Offering something beyond what others do will get people to buy what you sell. Maybe not at first, but if you offer something that’s better than another business down the street, and if you’re willing to go out of your way to ensure that your product or service does what you say it will do, then you’ll be on your way to creating your own demand.

A good example of this kind of simple marketing is Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders. After running a very successful restaurant for many years, he had to sell his operation when the new Interstate 75 bypassed Corbin, Kentucky. Instead of giving up on his dreams, he travelled across the country marketing his Original Recipe for fried chicken.

Sanders believed in hard work, and in the end that is what made his recipe a success. He had a good product, and devoted his time and effort to making sure restaurant owners knew about it, and he then got a percentage off each of their sales. Hard work in marketing will result in more customers, and hard work at pleasing those customers will inevitably result in these customers returning for more and bringing more customers with them.