What can a new business do to set itself apart on the market and achieve success?

In this episode of Smart City Navigators, we tackle the thought-provoking topic of building a brand and how new businesses, especially tech startups, can do this successfully.

Our guest is Ahmed Rafiey, who works at NaviParking as a Global Brand Manager and the Country Manager of The Kingdom of Bahrain.

Ahmed believes that what new businesses need to understand is that in order to make people believe in the product they are introducing to the market, they need to fully understand the needs of the market, adapt to them and be patient.

“For them [tech startups] to become culturally diffused into any sort of group of people or community they have to, first of all, define a clear purpose based on the root cause of a problem and based on what they can actually do with their capabilities, skillsets and resources to solve that problem.”

And what our guest points out is that new businesses need to be realistic about their resources because overpromising to their clients will only have negative results.

“A lot of technology companies overpromise and possibly underdeliver. This is because they haven’t gotten a clue on what their resources are.”

Because what technology companies often introduce to the market are brand new solutions built on innovation, they face the additional challenge of gaining people's trust, who may be suspicious of new technological solutions and refuse to use them.

“We are conditioned as humans to not accept change because we’re wired for survival at the end of the day. So in order for us to, let’s say, take a sample of the population who are thinking that the old school way is better to something else, we need to show them through human experience. We need to show them what our solutions, for example, do to make their lives easier, where does it fall in their daily routine that makes their lives seamless and convenient and efficient.”

So what can tech startups do when facing this challenge?

“In the technology sector, in general, we do get resistance of new products and new solutions. The way towards that is to, first of all, go for the highest impact. What I mean by that is we push the solution forward onto a mass adaptation instead of just going for a niche group in the beginning. And based on that, we do a trial and error kind of exercise all the time to find out whether we are meeting the needs of a certain group as opposed to another, what could we do for another group that is not really jumping on the bandwagon and so on and so forth.”

Watch the full episode to get more tips from our expert and learn how to effectively build the brand of your business and achieve success.