This just in: the whole pie is bigger than you think.
You’re familiar, I’m sure, with pie charts—those handy graphics representing 100 percent of a particular market and all the various segments into which it can be divided. The only problem with thinking of real markets in pie-chart terms, however, is that all the existing slices, taken together, may not represent the whole pie. The whole pie is always bigger.
Thus a pie chart of the U.S. nonalcoholic beverage market prior to the advent of carbonated drinks might well have shown three segments: coffee, tea, and milk. As far as marketers at the time were concerned, that was it! If you weren’t in coffee, tea, or milk, you weren’t selling drinks. Happily, Coca-Cola failed to get the word, and a whole new category was born.
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That’s Bob Lutz talking in his book GUTS.
Can you think of some other examples like this (i.e. Coca-Cola)?
Here’s one: Bacon salt.
My 2¢: Bob’s right—the whole pie is so much bigger than we often think.