The women of Camp Hansen were not attractive, but they were courted as if they were supermodels. I spent a year in Hansen as part of my service in the Marines. There were 6,000 or so Marines and maybe ten of them were female.
In the news recently: airlines are offering pilots three times their normal pay for taking on extra shifts.
When I started working in web development in 2007, businesses still asked each other for web design referrals. A couple of years later, suddenly everyone was looking for mobile developers.
What all of these are expressing is a significant imbalance in supply and demand.
As it pertains to small business growth, you need energy in the form of a market force in order to drive growth. When you’re investigating markets to address, one of the characteristics to look for is this imbalance.
Outside of Camp Hansen, it’s a self-correcting force. So in terms of identifying these markets, you want to identify corrections that will be slow, difficult, or just take a long time to occur.
As a concrete example, right now Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a year out from becoming the new standard for websites (*probably.) Google, in their infinite wisdom, decided to make it so that you need some level of skill to implement anything useful on GA4. Few people have switched and most people still don’t know how to. There is and will continue to be an imbalance in supply and demand that will drive purchases for probably six months to a year after the current Universal Analytics is shut down.
If you’re a digital agency, it’s worth considering the viability and ROI of harnessing some of this demand.
How you identify imbalances is for another post. The key thing to keep in mind is that you want positive pressure into the business. There are lots of tactics to achieve this and harnessing supply and demand is one that can require less effort to drive results. For a time.
Featured image is an aerial shot of Camp Hansen provided by the DOD and used under public domain.