Lessons from a campaign that challenged market assumptions 

I find myself using a quote regularly ‘There may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?’ This quote is closely associated with entrepreneur Ashley Faull whose business ventures have been inspired by identifying opportunities during major economic transitions. 

Diversifying and choosing new markets is riddled with challenges. But one thing we’ve learned from various campaigns is that, although there may be signs of opportunity, that doesn’t mean that it will be a good market to enter. 

Winning an opportunity with a large water company with regulatory and customer complaints issues, one of our clients wanted to run a full campaign to identify more opportunities across the sector. I advised caution. 

The problem was not evenly spread 

Our previous experience in the energy sector came to the fore as we knew that the water subsector was quite small and so I wondered how many other opportunities there might be available.  

We suggested to the client that we carry out a market testing campaign to identify what the potential opportunities were. Our testing and analysis found that complaint volumes were concentrated heavily within one company. Most other providers had significantly lower volumes. 

This mattered because the opportunity depended on more than companies operating in the same industry. It depended on whether enough of them faced a complaint management challenge of sufficient scale and urgency to justify buying the service. 

The addressable market was smaller than initially assumed. The wider sector did not offer enough scale and urgency to justify significant investment. We decided with the client against pursuing it aggressively, but applied the learning to other regulated industries facing similar complaint management challenges. 

What we took from the experience 

The mistake to watch for is treating the characteristics of one successful customer as representative of a whole sector. 

A customer success gives you something useful to investigate. Before building a wider campaign around it, I would want to understand why that particular organisation bought. 

– How significant was the problem? 

– What made it a priority? 

– Why did it need external support?

– How many other organisations face comparable circumstances? 

Those questions are more useful to me than simply identifying more companies with the same sector classification. 

In this example, complaint volumes were a critical distinction. A shared industry did not mean a shared commercial need at the same scale. 

What I would check before expanding a campaign 

I would start by testing how widely the conditions behind the original success actually exist. 

That means looking beyond sector, turnover and employee numbers to establish the severity of the problem, its consequences, who owns it and whether the organisation has the capability to address it internally. 

I would also look for evidence of willingness to invest. Recognising a problem and committing resources to solve it are different stages. Fairly frequently there might be a problem but if it’s not particularly difficult then companies will resolve the issues internally.  

The purpose is to establish how many accounts have a credible reason to buy before committing significant campaign spend. 

For me, the lesson from the water sector example is straightforward: use a successful customer to guide your research, then test whether the buying conditions repeat across the market. 

That is the evidence I want before scaling a campaign.