On wireless-remote-control toy (?) products
# Sizing up the market
1. Demographic numbers
: an indicator for gauging the size of the market pie
1) Baseline indicator: baby boomers
2) Short-term: the children of baby boomers
3) Long-term: the children of baby boomers' children
2. Trend-related keywords
: people who have some money but who have neglected themselves while living their social lives
They are gradually starting to give themselves gifts.
1) Growth of the "kidult" market
2) Recent newlyweds (declining infant numbers and one-child households)
3) Popularization of DIY culture
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Adult From the moment one starts to give gifts to oneself, — Ordinary People (Jeong Seok-won) |
1) Market research is only meaningful if it is actually research on the customers and the market.
So, in addition to desk research, in-depth interviews also have to be conducted properly. This is especially because the target customers aren't mass-market — they hold their own value judgments.
2) If the research is produced for internal decision-making and building internal consensus, though, the situation is different.
Creating documents to persuade insiders of the feasibility of a product whose target audience and traits are already clear — leaving aside the business feasibility or the technical development — means there's a problem with the very composition of the internal team.
It's the same as someone who can't or doesn't like coffee running a coffee-roasting shop. (That said, since the trend has been going since 2007, we should have relatively little expectation of "this might work out.")
If you need the technology, hand it off to a specialist company.
If you need money to outsource, then — even if it takes time — you need to re-pick an item you can earn money on yourself, here and now. The more the business expands and the heavier each decision gets, the more often decision points come and the faster a decision is demanded.
# Personal opinion
1. The kidult market has been an issue since 2007. But the companies that have succeeded because of it are extremely rare. Even their successes amount to little more than block-party scale. On top of that, the aging population will gradually shrink over time — that is, as operations expand.
And once operations are expanded, it becomes harder to pivot in a new direction or create another new business.
So, even if the visible short-term effect is small, I think long-term considerations should be part of setting the early direction.
My suggestion is: security.
Going forward, one dwelling per household will become the norm. But individual income will shrink, government revenues will gradually decline, and the welfare side will shrink further. Even today, families with family members receive relatively favorable treatment on tax deductions compared with single-person households.
I believe we can develop new items for their security, using the wireless communication, apps, and toys (wireless control) we already have.
2. Everything has an order. Before you can challenge or pioneer something new — before you can run, in other words — you first have to be able to stand on your own. So, generating revenue from the products or services currently being operated and built has to come first.
Here are approaches to concretize and activate that.
On the product and technology side, we are behind no one in comparison with our competitors. But it is also a fact that it won't take a year for competitors to catch up with our current technology.
So, when building the business model, we should go beyond pure-product thinking and be able to form a platform built on top of our existing products.
The already-mature kidult market, and the trend of treating development knowledge as a liberal-arts subject, are both growing in Korea and overseas. So we should make it possible to do educational work and various customization on top of our existing products and technology.
1) Host a nationwide touring competition.
2) Internally run an open-source development program. Participate in programming campaigns. Host seminars.
(Create the flow… no, grow the flow. Make it seem as if we created it. Make it our turf.)
3) Build the products as characters. Each character has its own function. There should be no "average" function.
4) Produce cartoons and media around each character's distinct personality or temperament.
5) Develop the parts as modules so that each product can be split up and sold separately.
6) Distribute the open-source tools we developed internally through an in-house store.
