Expanding into New Markets
Being in a Clinical Lab during the Covid-19 pandemic has shown me the continuous innovation afoot and the ability of companies to shift and adapt at an unprecedented speed.
Our lab has adopted several platforms for the diagnosis of the novel SARS-Cov-2 virus. For this blog, I will assert the argument that this novel virus has in itself created a new market, defined in the Kerin text glossary as “people with both the desire and the ability to buy a specific offering.” Healthcare settings need modes of testing for the patients, and must look to a variety of diagnostic companies to find the most specific, sensitive, accurate, time, and cost-efficient methods to provide care. The need and pandemic in itself is a new market.
For this assignment, we are asked to find an example of a brand that recently expanded distribution beyond its original market, and to describe the challenges they faced and what they could have done better.
A few weeks ago, I was invited to attend the virtual presentation for a possible new platform for Sars-Cov-2 testing offered by a diagnostic company. T2 Biosystems uses novel TMRI miniaturized magnetic resonance technology to detect molecular targets in patient samples. Previously, their market focus has been in pathogenic causes of Sepsis, a life-threatening condition, and they have two approved panels for detecting the most common fungal and bacterial species of cause. In this training, we learned of their newest expansion into Covid-19 diagnostics, to detect the viral targets. In this training, I not only learned how the technology would work, but also saw how a B2B meeting of minds occurred. B2B or business to business, described in the Godin text as “when a business sells something to another one,” and in this case a diagnostics company selling an expansion of their platform to a hospital.
The meeting was informative, the supervisors and technologists taking away new knowledge, but with some good points and points of improvement. One main area of improvement being that the platform would only provide a qualitative result (positive or negative) not a quantifiable value or cycle threshold as in other RT-PCR technology the lab currently uses for Covid testing; so it would not, as experts say, give a number linked to how infectious a person may be. But it would still give a result to providers.
Overall, it is exciting to see how companies are adapting and expanding into new markets during this pandemic.
