Marketing is an important function at any time, but it’s perhaps most crucial for a company entering a hypergrowth phase. The product might be selling well, but can be killed by any number of missteps: create demand faster than you can fill orders, and the market may turn away from your brand, never to return. Move too slowly and a competitor may elbow you aside. Target the wrong market and in two years, your product may be obsolete and unable to meet the needs of the emerging market.
Chapman recounts for instance the example of a wrong turn by an early leader in the word processing market, MicroPro, maker of WordStar, which went out of business in part because it created two products with the same price point, functionality, and target audience and tried to sell both at the same time. A few years later, Borland did the same thing, he said, followed by Novell.
[This article has been reproduced with permission from CKGSB Knowledge, the online research journal of the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business (CKGSB), China's leading independent business school. For more articles on China business strategy, please visit CKGSB Knowledge.]