When an inventor invents a product or service, he/she assume the customer and/or the market will use the invention in the way the inventor intended. But, sometimes, it’s the market that should make that decision.
In the case study I write about in my book, Invent-onomics 101: A Guide to Getting Your Invention to Market Without Losing Your Shirt, I describe how I effectively “pigeon-holed” my product into one market category… Totally missing a much larger potential market.
The invention in Invent-onomics 101 was designed to attract deer and other wildlife during the day using different animal and food scents. What I didn’t realize when developing the tooling, patent and marketing plan was there was an infinitely bigger market (about 100 times the size) for Gardeners who wanted to keep the deer and other animals away from their plants.
Filling my “animal attracting invention” with predator scents (coyote scent) versus scent that attracts, a gardener in Harrisburg, PA discovered that my invention kept the deer away from her vegetables and flower. The total potential market size for the product went from 1 million scent dispensers to 100 million that day. The problem was I had already filed the patent based upon the intended use (attracting animals) and tooled the product with “THE BUCK MAGNET” molded into every assembly.
This “short sited” mistake cost me a deal with a major lawn and garden company and forced me to issue a second patent (more money to the patent attorney) to cover “repelling” animals.
The lesson: Keep your invention/new product flexible. Try not to permanently mark anything on the product. This will keep the product flexible in the market (private labeling) and give potential customers/distributors more options to expand into other markets you never imagined.
