B2C Is always harder...

When you're working in startup mode, one of your core missions (if not a unique mission) is to understand the problem you want to solve for your market. And I've been repeating for eternity that it's somehow easy in B2B, while B2C is always fantastically more complicated. The reason essentially is that businesses act as predictable organisms with processes, balance sheets, and KPIs, while consumers never behave as the proverbial homo economicus.

An extremely amusing example of how B2C tends to be inscrutable felt in my lap recently. I was recently helping a customer with market research and was discussing which country is most active in biking, and to my surprise, the Netherlands scored... last.

Living in the country (the country with the most km of cycling lanes per inhabitant in the world), it honestly took me a split second to understand what was at play.

The phrasing of the poll was precise.

It wasn't about cycling but about practicing cycling as a sport.

And the Dutch? They automatically separate someone on a regular bike going for groceries or commuting (fietser) and the ones using race bikes for sport, mostly on weekends (wielrenners).

The poll ends up in a fantastic paradox where one of the most active biking populations on the planet declares they don't practice much biking. In this context, depending on the problem you want to solve in the market, the Netherlands can be the worst or the best market possible. You "just" have to translate the nuance they automatically inserted in the question, which is terribly difficult if you don't have any form of cultural insight into this country, to begin with.

This is in a nutshell why B2C is always harder...