I recently spent a week in Singapore. This was my first visit to an Asian country, so that made it very cool. But, since I’ve been lax on my blog, I realized that I haven’t taken the time to talk about what I learned. Today I wanted to talk a little about market saturation… or maybe not???
while I was Singapore, I was roughly 3 blocks from my hotel to the office. The temps in Singapore are consistently in the 90’s and humid, so even short walks seem very long and very sticky. Well, over the course of my walks I started to notice the number of coffee shops. Three Starbucks, and at least 2 other “non-chain” coffee shops, all within a 1 block radius of the office. Granted, there were several large buildings in the area, but regardless of the time of day, any coffee shop we went to always had a line. Sometimes long, sometimes shorter, but always a line. And since the time change was hell for me, we drank a lot of coffee. That meant 8 or 9AM, noon, 2pm, even 6pm. No matter when, always people in there spending money.
The realization came to me that not only did people enjoy coffee, they enjoyed the airconditioning, and the chance to escape work for 15 minutes to get some coffee. The take-away this put into my head is that sometimes what you’re selling isn’t your product. Sometimes you are selling an escape, an oasis, or a mental break… the coffee is just an excuse to get there…
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike