If your customers discover their problem through your product, you don’t have a market yet

In the Masterclass I devoted to creative strategy on Meta, one sentence keeps coming back when it’s time to build personas: your characters must not discover their problems through your solution, or else you don’t have a market.

That sentence gives a simple criterion for placing a product between the two oceans. A market exists when your customers have the problem before they know your product. Too far ahead, a product arrives before the problem. Too crowded, it arrives after everyone else, with the same words. This article explains both pitfalls, what Kim and Mauborgne’s book actually says about each, and what it changes in the way you speak to your market on Meta.

In short

• A market starts with a problem people already live with, whether or not they’re aware of it.
• The persona that shows it is stand-alone: it lives with its problem independently of your product. The product-centered persona describes a feature of the offer (a material, a price, a feature set).
• Not knowing you have a problem and discovering it through a product are two different situations. The first describes the largest mass of the market; the second signals a product with no market.
• The product that is too far ahead is what Kim and Mauborgne call “valueless” innovation: a technology that goes beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.
• The red ocean is the market where everyone fights over the same demand. Product-centered personas add to it, because they bring the conversation back to features and price.
• According to the authors themselves, most blue oceans are born within red oceans: around an existing need, among people the current offer doesn’t serve.

A good persona has its problem before you

When you ask a paid media team to describe its personas, the answer often fits in four or five words. Three real examples, met over my experience with e-commerce brands and in my own company:

1. 1A lingerie brand: “the woman aged 25 to 60 who wants more comfort.”
2. 2A mattress brand: affluent urban couples living downtown.
3. 3A software publisher for paid media teams: “the social ads media buyer.”

All three descriptions share the same flaw. They describe the product. Comfort points to the organic cotton made in Portugal that the brand is proud of. Affluent couples point to the price of a mattress made in France. The media buyer points to the software’s features, which connect to Meta and Google. I call these product-centered personas: a feature of the offer, turned into a character.

The same targets, rewritten as stand-alone personas, look like this:

1. 1A woman aged 30 to 40 who, when she gets home in the evening, takes off her bra first and changes into pajamas. Her lingerie leaves marks, hurts her, and has bothered her all day.
2. 2A man over 35 who wakes up every morning with his back in pieces. He just had a baby and struggles to carry his 22-pound daughter. At the office, he can no longer sit for more than thirty minutes; he bought himself a walking pad and a sit-stand desk.
3. 3A media buyer who presents his results to his client with a Looker Studio dashboard that shows wrong numbers and takes ten minutes to load. Ten minutes face to face, when you don’t have much to say, is a long time.

None of these three descriptions mentions the brand or the product. These characters live independently of the solution. In their daily lives, they have a problem that hurts, literally for the first two: it’s painful to have a bad back, painful to have been hurting all day, painful to look like someone who doesn’t have a handle on their numbers in front of their client.

That’s where the market is. A situation shared by the vast majority of women, like the first one, is demand that already exists. The product fits into it. Conversely, if the only moment the customer runs into their problem is the moment they discover the product, there is no one to go after: the product first has to create the problem, then solve it.

Not knowing your problem, or discovering it through a product

An objection comes up quickly. The marketing funnel splits the target market into five levels of awareness. At the very top are the unaware, who aren’t aware of the problem you solve. At the very bottom, the most aware are ready to buy, if not right now, then tomorrow; they make up only a very small share of the whole. The entire funnel, from top to bottom, is the target market, and the vast majority of that market isn’t aware of its problem. Does the opening sentence contradict the funnel, then?

The difference comes down to one word: awareness. The unaware person has the problem; they just don’t see it yet. Someone who discovers their problem through your product didn’t have it before.

Back to the media buyer. At the unaware stage, he blocks four hours every Monday morning for reporting on his four clients: one hour per client, copy-and-paste and screenshots from Shopify, Meta and Google, all gathered in a spreadsheet. By noon he’s done, and he thinks he’s efficient. He isn’t aware he has a problem. Yet the problem is there, in his calendar, every week.

To speak to him, an ad can use a contrarian truth: what his client judges him on is the quality and precision of his answer when the client asks why their cost per acquisition is going up, far more than his reporting. That message wakes up something that already existed. The media buyer can then move to the next stage, problem aware: he’s aware of his problem. He moves his reporting to Sunday evening, in front of the TV, and realizes it isn’t sustainable.

The same reasoning explains the organic content of brands that work. It speaks to the largest mass of the target market, the people not yet aware of their problem, by talking about that problem: a mattress brand talks about back pain; an inclusive lingerie brand talks about how hard it is to feel comfortable in your body; software for paid media teams talks about paid media strategies on Meta, Google and TikTok. This content moves prospects down one or two stages, toward problem aware, or even solution aware (the person knows solutions exist).

To be precise: a brand can make people aware of a problem. It can’t invent one. The test is about the persona’s life before the product. If their day already contains the pain, the market exists, even if it’s silent. If it doesn’t, the creative first has to make the problem exist before offering the solution, and that’s the sign of a market that doesn’t exist yet.

Too early: the blue ocean that arrives before the problem

Kim and Mauborgne’s book is often summed up by its promise: create uncontested market space. People forget that it sets a condition. Its central notion, value innovation, means pursuing differentiation and low cost at the same time, to create a leap in value for both the buyer and the company.

The authors contrast value innovation with “valueless” innovation. On their website, they describe it this way: it tends to be technology-driven, market-pioneering or futuristic, and often shoots beyond what buyers are ready to accept and pay for.

They give two examples of this kind of technology innovation with no value for the buyer:

1. 1The Segway. A remarkable technology, but too bulky for sidewalks, too small and too slow for the road, and expensive. Its features had no obvious group of buyers beyond niche uses. The authors call it an outright commercial failure.
2. 2Iridium, Motorola’s satellite phone. A technical feat of about five billion dollars that delivered little value to the ordinary person: unusable inside buildings and cars, heavy and bulky. According to the authors, Motorola failed to link the technology to a leap in value for business executives. The company was later rescued by a contract with the US military.

Read alongside the opening sentence, these two examples come close to it. The technology worked, but no large enough group of buyers lived with the problem to the point of paying the asking price. The market was still to be found.

What it changes for advertising: a product that is too far ahead has no stand-alone persona to put on screen. A creative can then talk only about the product itself, its technology and its features. It describes a feature, because it can’t describe a day.

What the book actually calls a blue ocean

The authors say it in their founding Harvard Business Review article (2004): most blue oceans are created from within red oceans, inside existing industries.

Their best-known example is Cirque du Soleil. The circus industry was, in their words, in long-term decline. Cirque du Soleil drew in an audience that wasn’t buying circus: adults and corporate clients who had turned to theater, opera or ballet. You can read an existing need in it: those spectators were already looking for a night out at a show, and finding it elsewhere. The blue ocean was built on an existing need, among people the established offer didn’t serve.

The authors even formalized this reservoir: the three tiers of noncustomers of an industry (those about to leave, those who refuse the offer, those no one has ever explored). They recommend looking for what these noncustomers have in common, because that’s where the largest new demand is created. This vocabulary echoes the funnel: in both cases, a large share of the market has a real need and isn’t buying yet.

The economic stakes are real. In the same authors’ study of the business launches of 108 companies, 86% of launches were line extensions; they generated 62% of total revenue, but 39% of profits. The 14% of launches aimed at creating new markets generated 38% of revenue and 61% of profits.

Too late: the red ocean, where everyone talks about the product

At the opposite end from the blue ocean, Kim and Mauborgne define red oceans as all the industries in existence today, the known market space. The more crowded that space gets, the more companies fight over a share of limited demand, and the more the prospects for profit and growth shrink.

The traditional circus is the example they give in the Harvard Business Review: an industry in long-term decline, where the public’s appetite for animal acts was fading fast.

The problem there is well and truly lived; everyone knows it. The difficulty changes in kind: every brand speaks to the same demand. And that’s where product-centered personas become the market’s common language. When everyone describes their target by a feature of their offer (comfort, price, features), the conversation comes back to product and price, and brands start to look alike.

A second criterion adds to the first here: a good persona is specific. It tells the precise story of someone, while a generic persona describes everyone. Teams fall into the generic because they have budget, five, ten or a hundred thousand dollars a month, and want to speak to their whole market.

On Meta, that reflex has a cost, which I covered in detail in the Masterclass. When an ad tries to speak to its whole market, for example “for all women who love comfort,” the Andromeda algorithm easily finds it an audience: everyone. But it converts very little, because people don’t have time to stop for a message that isn’t about them. Every click is paid for, with a cost per click of several dollars, and a large share of the traffic sent to the site is sent for nothing. The ad that speaks to the woman who gets home with marks on her skin reaches a smaller audience, but holds its attention, and converts more.

The auction mechanism pushes in the same direction. A brand is never alone in targeting an audience: an auction system inside Meta decides which ad gets shown. In a red ocean, many brands target the same people. Meta gives a simplified formula for it: an ad’s value in the auction equals the value of the conversion, multiplied by the probability of conversion, plus a quality score. That probability depends on the relevance between the creative and the person who sees it. A creative built on a stand-alone, specific persona therefore has what it takes to stand out from those describing the same product with the same words, without paying more.

In a crowded market as in a market still to be created, the starting point stays the same: the problem the persona lives with before knowing the product.

What this criterion doesn’t settle

A caveat is in order. The stand-alone persona test tells you whether a problem exists; it doesn’t tell you how many people live with it, or how much they’re willing to pay. The Segway had real niche uses, and Iridium eventually found a customer in the US military. An existing problem can be too rare or not painful enough to carry a business.

Nor does the criterion tell you whether a market is too crowded to enter. It describes a way of speaking in it that reduces how much brands look alike, while the competition remains.

Finally, the book’s examples are read in hindsight. It’s easier to explain why Cirque du Soleil succeeded than to predict, before launch, which product will find its market. The criterion gives no certainty; it helps you ask the right question, early.

Three questions to place a product

1. 1Can you describe the persona’s day, and the moment the problem hurts, without mentioning the product, its material, its price or its features?
2. 2Did this problem exist in their life before the product existed, even if they weren’t aware of it?
3. 3Do your competitors’ ads describe their target with the same features as yours?

A no to the first two questions signals a product ahead of its market. A yes to the third signals a red ocean, where the difference comes down to how precise the persona is.

A market starts where the problem existed before you.