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Alex Deane was born in
Madison, Wisconsin in 1922 and he quickly discovered a flair for
writing as well as a love of the adrenalin charged sport of
parachuting, so as a young man he started writing books about
parachuting and other low-cost aerial sports. Not much of a
market for these, you may think; and you'd be absolutely
correct, most people if they saw them on a bookshelf would
simply pass by and look for something a little more to their own
tastes. The difference between Dean however and more
unsuccessful writers is that he had a flair for marketing. He
didn't offer his books to the mainstream publishers because he
knew that even if he could persuade them to stock them they
would never sell very many of them anyway, so what he did do was
quite simple. He published the books himself, so cutting out the
middleman; and he sold them directly to parachuting and
skydiving clubs, hang glider associations, at paragliding
exhibitions and to the United States Parachute Association.
Needless to say they sold well, and since he was able to charge
a reasonably high price for the books (let's face it, he didn't
have a great deal of competition did he?) he made quite a decent
profit from them. He very quickly became well-known within
parachuting circles and his books sold steadily for more than 30
years.
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What has this got to teach
a marketer? It is all about finding a unique, or practically
unique, niche. One of the main keys to selling success is to
offer your product directly to those people who would benefit
from it the most, and if that product is one which is not easily
available from a competitor then it is possible to charge a
premium price for it and to expect a good level of sales.
Had Deane attempted to
sell millions of books at a low-price through conventional
outlets he would have failed dismally, but he didn't do that.
Had he been the most brilliant writer that the world has ever
produced, failure would still have been inevitable but he
succeeded not because he was a particularly brilliant writer
(even though some may consider that he ticked all the boxes) but
because he decided that his product was be a series of books on
the subject for which there were no real, obvious competitors;
and he offered the product directly to the market that he knew
was the most likely one to purchase it.
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