I recently read on a forum how someone felt it was a scam that the manufacturing companies started marketing that women need to shave their arm pits in order to sell women's razors and shaving lotion, creating a whole industry. I can think of a huge number of products that came about due to that very thing. Creating the idea that a certain niche market needed this product or it would make their life easier in some way.
In fact, some of us, who grew up in the fifties and before, can remember when not every home had a telephone, a television, a clothes dryer or especially.........two cars! On a post sometime ago, on my Homesteading on the Internet blog, I wrote this:
"When the electric grid was in the early years everyone just wanted it for lights. General Electric manufactured appliances that were hardly selling. Light bulbs were their hottest sellers. Everyone wanted electric lights and that is how they initially got into our homes! I know my mother-in-law used to say that her father loved his electric lights. I am sure he did. So GE kept trying to figure out how to reach the housewives to get them to want the refrigerators, electric stoves and washing machines. They campaigned long and hard figuring out how to make her not only WANT these appliances but how to NEED them. They did it too."
If you come up with a product that people not only want, but need, then you would do well. To make it even better you need to come up with a product that you can make and nobody else has. I think you need to really think about it, study and talk about to others who have an interest in creating products too. That is how all the big companies got started to begin with.
Copyright © 2012 Kathleen G. Lupole
All Photographs Copyright © 2012 Kathleen G. Lupole
