Focusing on your core business

The first step to developing a marketing plan is to know what core business you’re in or sometimes called the category definition. Here’s an example, let’s imagine you’re a maker of high quality furniture and home goods. Now you could define your core business narrowly, just furniture for the living room, sofas and chairs. Or you could broaden the scope so that your core business is furniture of any size, shape, and material for any room in the house. Now if you expand further, your core business could be defined as home decor. Now you offer things like artwork, accessories, and other design aspects to go along with your furniture. Hey, you could define the entire core business around a primary benefit. For example, we are in the core business of home lifestyle. In this very broad case, you’d change your strategic prospective and offer a wide variety of products to create a quality experience throughout the home furniture, small appliances, entertainment, floor covering, everything. With each change in the core business definition, the size of the business opportunity gets bigger, but so does the amount of competition. and you have to be good at so many other things. So, is it better to focus on the things that you do really well and deliver that consistently to your customers or should you expand your core and try to grow the business. My advice is to define your core business just up to the point where you can still leverage your core skills or what are called core competencies. Hey, if you try to do things that you’re not skilled at doing you’ll run into trouble.