What Does a Marketing Company do?

I wish I had spent more time in biz school learning the trade. When you have a b2b company (My former employer Bittorrent, for instance) how do you perform market analysis? Who's the target market?

Well, it seems that for a b2b company, the target market is some times better defined by the target market of the target market.

Using Bittorrent again for example. The target market are numerous. (The product DNA, Distributed Network Accelerator)

The target market is anybody who wants to transfer the same bits over the network.

But this is made easier if we analyze the target market of the target market.

Who needs to transfer same large files to many people? (a priori, not streaming as is the case with youtube, google earth, ... hmm actually, maybe that's another target market)


The users who can withstand some latency:

• Movie watchers downloading HD/blueray movies.
• Game players downloading game graphics
• Sysops downloading linux DVD images
• Scientific data sharing
• Intra-company transfer of data file.

From there, the target market suddenly becomes clear

• Media companies: youtube, hulu, porno sites, netflix, if p2p streaming is supported then all the better
• Game designers or Game distribution channels
• Linux distro companies or organizations (redhat, etc., etc.)
• Scientific data sharing is usually between university labs (so market to the universities directly and get a share of the NSF/NIH funding)
• Intra-company is harder, there are of course products in this area from companies such as Microsoft.

So because we begun to investigate the target market of our target market, the target market analysis suddenly became easy. And the sales prospects just became really really obvious.


Of course, most successful marketers will have done this subconsciously and arrived at the finally analysis directly as if by pure genius. For me, I'll just have to square that target market analysis process.