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All businesses would like to gain more control over how often their marketing campaigns are truly effective. But for many companies, marketing success is often a result of fortuitous accidents, as the following examples from three of my clients demonstrate.

Fortuitous accident #1: In the course of conducting customer satisfaction research, a company accidentally discovers that the vast majority of its customers use its product for a completely different purpose than originally intended. By slightly restructuring the product and refocusing its marketing message to feature this newly discovered use, the company adds millions in profits to its bottom line.

Fortuitous accident #2: A company hires an outside firm to review its ad copy, thinking that improving the copy would produce a significant jump in sales. But it turns out that the copy is actually quite good. The real reason its marketing isn't producing results is that it's getting tossed out by a gatekeeper, never getting into the hands of the intended prospects. By finding a new delivery method that will get the marketing piece past the mailroom and the gatekeeper, and directly into the hands of the intended prospects, sales soar.

Fortuitous accident #3: A software company discovers that its demo CDs are getting mangled by the machines that the post office uses to process mail. It put a simple message on the outer envelope: "Please do not bend or x-ray—magnetic media enclosed." This message not only prevented the CDs from being mutilated, but the implied value increased sales significantly.

What do all of these fortuitous accidents have in common?

These companies stumbled onto opportunity gaps—lucrative, but hidden, marketing opportunities that they and their competition were completely missing.

The fact is, there are dozens of opportunity gaps in any business. Some of them are product gaps—desirable features or functions that a product is missing. Some of them are marketing gaps—positioning, offers and marketing messages that are more potent than what you're currently using.

Have you ever wondered why a competitor whose product isn't as good as yours always seems to outsell you? It's because, either deliberately or by accident, it has discovered an opportunity gap that gives it a powerful competitive advantage.

You could easily make up this lost ground by finding your own opportunity gaps that would allow you to capture far greater market share. But the reason most businesses don't take advantage of these gaps is that they are rarely discovered intentionally. If you look at the examples above, these companies didn't even recognize that a gap existed before an ugly problem reared its head.

But if you really want to dominate your market, you must begin to look for these hidden opportunities before a problem or a competitor's superior offer forces you to make decisions reactively.

Trigger Events

Every new idea is stimulated by a trigger event. Something happens that causes you to consider a situation in a new and different light. In the three examples above, the trigger events all occurred accidentally. And this is how most trigger events are initially recognized.

For example, when the software company's demo CDs were getting mangled by mail processing machinery, it created a trigger event that forced the software company to come up with a solution. However, the solution was intended to solve an operational problem, not to improve marketing. It was a completely unexpected side effect that the message "Please do not bend or x-ray—magnetic media enclosed" actually increased the perceived value of the package and prompted more people to open it, resulting in increased sales.

While these types of events that accidentally uncover opportunity gaps can be quite lucrative, the problem is that you never know when an accidental opportunity will present itself—or whether it ever will. If you stand around waiting in the rain for a bolt of marketing lightning to strike, you may just end up with a wet fuse that fizzles out.

So the trick is to be able to discover these lucrative opportunity gaps on demand, and before your competition has any hint that they even exist.

Rolling Your Own

While almost all trigger events occur by accident, the good news is that you can cause them to occur at any time, and as often as you need to. All it requires is a shift in attitude and a simple process that allows you to intentionally create your own trigger events.

The attitude shift is small, but it's often the most difficult aspect. Instead of passively waiting for market conditions, problems or opportunities to present themselves, you have to shift to a proactive method of seeking out these situations before they actually occur. As simple as this may sound, most companies are so conditioned to being reactive rather than proactive that it takes dedication to make this shift.

But once you've committed to making the shift, the process of creating your own trigger events is relatively simple and can potentially deliver substantial rewards. The process employs a long list of trigger questions that starts with these:

Trigger Question 1: What is the easiest opportunity available to your business?

Working either by yourself or with a team of your staff members, list as many potential answers to this question as possible. Then, go through your list and rate each idea, keeping only the top one or two.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bob Serling is the founder of Idea Quotient. Contact him at bserling@IdeaQuotient.com.