Targeting a New Audience

• By: admin
• On: 01/01/2025 11:38:01
• In: General Interest

Golf is an exceedingly difficult game. New players often shank the ball into the rough or the nearest water hazard. In the early 1990s, Callaway, a heavyweight in the golf club market, developed a larger club called Big Bertha, which had a more prominent sweet spot and was more forgivable, thereby attracting a new audience to the game. Callaway identified what business folk call a “blue ocean strategy,” which is the term for a new market with little competition. The opposite, which many auctioneers can attest to, is the “red ocean,” where competition is fierce as businesses go after that same target audience. Callaway had plenty of products for proficient golfers, but the Big Bertha line was marketed directly to the “non-players,” giving them a more pain-free path into the sport. It worked.

What does this have to do with the auction industry? Chris Rasmus, CAI, AMM, can speak at length about the blue ocean strategy and how auctioneers can successfully navigate these waters. His company, Rasmus Auctions, which he established with his wife in 1975, was a pioneer in adopting the online auction format. However, his novel approach using an app that allows the sellers to do the bulk of the auction work indeed took his company to the blue ocean. “We didn't know we were a blue ocean strategy until I read the book,” Rasmus said of the 2005 publication, “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, which covers creating uncontested market space and making the competition irrelevant. The book also includes the Callaway/ Big Bertha story.

Rasmus tapped into a new market, allowing online sellers to use his app on their smartphones to take photos of their goods and input the model, manufacturer and description of the items being sold. All the information is uploaded to Rasmus's site and the auction goes live for two or three days. Buyers can then arrange when to pick up their goods. All Rasmus's company has done is promote the auctions and ensure everyone follows the rules of the auctions.

“Why would the seller do that?” Rasmus asked. “Because the sales pitch is very simple: If I come out there and do it all, it's going to cost X. If you do it yourself, it's going to cost X minus. And the response is, ‘tell me more about the I do it myself part.'”The X minus in this equation comes at no cost to the seller, which is another perk. Instead, Rasmus Auctions gets paid via a buyer's premium.

The Farmland Guy

David Whitaker also took an outside-the-box approach to getting his auction business into blue ocean territory. Whitaker Marketing Group, which he runs with his wife and a “handful” of others, focuses mainly on farm auctions in Iowa, where he lives.

Whitaker's goal was to become the “farmland guy.” He has had a lot of success in getting closer to that goal with social media content he's posted, including on TikTok (@farmlandguy), where one of his videos recorded at an auction school has earned 2.8 million views. Many of his shorts about his industry on TikTok have gained hundreds of thousands of views. “Yes, I booked a farm from TikTok,” Whitaker said. “It's been done. (TikTok is) not just dancing videos. A (seller) called and I said, ‘how did you find me?' and he said, ‘I saw you on TikTok.”

Whitaker said his company is firmly planted in a “red ocean” where he's competing against $700 million to $800 million companies. Part of his strategy to stand out from them is to dig deep into the data about what farms are selling for, catalog the data and create all types of content about this information and share it with people on various social media platforms.

In marketing language, the outcome of sharing this knowledge is that Whitaker becomes a “thought leader” in his industry, which implants the idea in the minds of those who come across his posts that he knows more than those $800 companies. “I started sharing every result from every sale, and all of a sudden, all the buyers were like, ‘Who is this person? What is he doing?'” he said. “So, every month I started writing articles to be the person that they trusted. When somebody says ‘David Whitaker,' I want the next word to be ‘farmland.'”