Entrepreneurship. Rhonda Abrams

is your customer the snack foods buyer at the grocery store? This person’s concerns are down to earth: how much money you’ll spend on advertising, how quickly you’ll replenish inventory, and whether you’ll pay the store a stocking fee to obtain shelf space.

      Recreational athletes and other consumers won’t have a chance to buy or eat your energy bars if you don’t meet the supermarket buyers’ needs first. On top of that, if you don’t have your own sales and distribution force to sell to snack shops and supermarkets, it’s likely you’ll first have to find a distributor and convince them to carry your product.

      The coach. The athlete. The store buyer. The distributor. You have to satisfy a lot of customers with each energy bar. You’ll give yourself a competitive edge by thinking of each of these customers—and planning for their needs and motivation.

      Being responsive to the details that are important to distributors, retailers, sales representatives, and others helps you plan your marketing materials, operations, packaging—and even the nature of the product itself. If sales reps in your industry must purchase their samples, for instance, you can set yourself apart by supplying free samples. If retailers can fit more square packages on a shelf than round packages, you’ll be more competitive by choosing a square package.

      Even if you think you’ll market directly to consumers on the Internet, you’ll discover that there are still many entities between you and your customer in cyberspace. In the case of the energy bars, your intermediary might be the online grocery store, a health food site, a sporting goods store, a gym, or a search engine that will help customers find you. So you’ll still have more than simply athletes to please.

       Primary and secondary customers

       Your primary customers are the ones you spend the most time (and money) targeting. For example, if you manufacture outdoor apparel, your primary customer could be a snowboarding or surfing enthusiast. Yet you might also have secondary customers—customers you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be interested in your product.