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DEVELOPING NEW BUSINESS IDEAS180

The difficulty initially encountered by the cut-price easyCinema in
securing first releases from the major vertically integrated film
companies almost assumed the status of a ‘fatal flaw’ in the easyCinema
concept. As its website noted with relief:

‘easyCinema opened its doors in Milton Keynes a year ago and has been
met with high consumer demand while it has struggled to get more and
more recent films from distributors. In the past few months, easyCinema
has been getting an increasing supply of first run films which tended to be
art house or foreign language films. Shrek 2, however, represents a
mainstream commercial film being shown on first run in easyCinema.’131

Mail-order lingerie company Bravissimo had to establish a dummy
geographical presence to circumvent a supplier boycott engineered by a
local competitor. As Sarah Tremellen, the founder, admitted: ‘We
decided to start up in Oxford, where my parents live. However, the
company was in Oxford on paper only. We set up a P.O. box there and
asked them to deliver to Twickenham in Middlesex; we also had a
phone service on permanent divert.’132

viable route to market You need to be clear that a viable and clear
route exists for you to reach the market. In the mid-1980s, Andrew
Palmer identified the opportunity for a new food product, namely that
of ready-to-eat fresh soup. His research rapidly identified that he would
have sell his soup via independent retailers in order to validate the
concept before the major UK supermarket chains would consider
stocking the product.

In an iteration typical of the evaluation step, Palmer discovered that the
independent sector would not risk stocking a new-to-the-world product
which only had the four-to-five day shelf-life typical for chilled-food
products. The critical success factor thus evolved into the ability to
extend the shelf-life of a product made exclusively from natural
ingredients. Extensive third-party expertise, including Reading
University’s Food Technology Department, assisted Palmer in
developing a process which allowed a minimum 14-day shelf-life. New
Covent Garden Soup Company was now on its way.133

You should also consider whether the market is so geographically
dispersed that you cannot access it: is buying power concentrated in
such a limited number of companies that a superficially attractive
market is all but barred to new entrants? Can you reconfigure your
business idea to overcome this obstacle or should the idea be
eliminated from consideration?