Place your cash bets behind proven demand!.
The term, “demand pull – cost push” was created by the great economist, John Maynard Keynes, to describe the two primary drivers of economic inflation.
Demand pull: too much demand for a product or service and not enough supply cause competition for the product that drives prices higher without increasing the intrinsic value of the product.
Cost push: labor or parts costs increase, causing the product or service to be priced higher without adding intrinsic value. As a student of economics, I studied Keynes and his many theories of macro and microeconomics.
But this one kept returning to me as an excellent way to describe a completely different business principle.
Redefining a phrase to describe our business strategies.
[Email readers, continue here…] All our enterprises have limited resources, even the largest of the Fortune 500, and especially the smallest of competitors in a market.
Most new product introductions are planned with a broad campaign aimed toward the whole of the marketplace, committing resources such as money and manpower to the effort.
I have learned over the years that this may not be prudent.
Instead, seeding various segments of the market, vertical niches, with focused attention in the form of marketing and sales efforts, will quickly yield positive results from some niches and perhaps no interest from others. It is upon the moment of understanding which niches respond positively to the new offering that a company should push costs into increased marketing and sales efforts into those niches, concentrating fire power and overwhelming the niche, instead of making few waves in an ocean of broad opportunities and becoming lost in the process.
To describe this, Keynes comes to mind.
Push the costs into market niches where you seed your marketing and experience the pull of customer demand as a result. Cost push – demand pull.
Images created using DALL-E3 and the prompt: “A college teacher in front of a whiteboard showing the graph of “demand pull; cost push” readable behind him as he speaks to his college class. Realistic characters.”
