I can outline this market in more detail. At the time I was helping a couple of Colombian girls to improve their English. I  frequently tried to  use  Grazia magazines to help them learn more contemporary English.  They weren’t that interested but the numerous references in the magazines to 50 Shades of Grey interested me. I could not come to any other conclusion than that millions of women were dissatisfied with their sex lives and this was the book to help remedy the situation.

Word of mouth and peer pressure played a major part in the success of the book but surely not in a way the author  had expected – so good for lucky her to have stumbled upon a huge market of sexually bored and frustrated women, many of whom find no place for books or reading in their lives.

And the same is true for you and me no matter what we are trying to sell or promote. If everyone who doesn’t buy our stuff started to do so we would all be a lot richer. We can’t presume to be as lucky as E L James, so it is necessary for us to look beyond the obvious outlets and target audiences, to think creatively about people who would never think of buying or reading what we have to offer or promote.

For example, I started looking at poetry sites to which I could upload my own poetry. I started with sites that only feature original and unpublished poetry. I read dozens of poems on these sites and was struck by how many of the poems were really long and unedited pieces of blank verse with loads of spelling mistakes and grammatical errors. Many were highly personal and confessional about really dark and depressing subjects such as cutting, rejection and suicide.

I, on the other hand, write really short and highly polished nonsense verse that is  totally random and bizarre. Every poem rhymes and scans. There is not a single word about me as I choose to write about famous people as well as fairy tale  and nursery rhyme characters. Also there is not a word of negativity. It dawned on me that my poetry could die a death on poetry only sites so I started looking elsewhere. First I tried what I call creative sites that feature not only poetry but either general writing or art as well and then even more general sites that are happy to feature just about anything.

Lo and behold, after uploading 33 poems to 14 sites my fears proved to be well founded. With one exception – 11,000+ reads in nine months – the poetry only sites were a complete disaster. I got a much better response on the more general sites. By analysing objectively my own poetry I had at least managed to find another audience for the sort of poetry I write.

And whatever you are selling or promoting, you may benefit from considering what people may get from your product, who have never even thought about such a product, let alone purchasing it. That is what this article is ultimately about – being more successful in business and the arts by tapping into less obvious areas you would never dream about selling to.

So let’s dream.

You sell tractors and all of them go to farmers. You hear about mechanically unreliable tow trucks letting their owners down. They ain’t farmers but soon they are buying your tractors to tow at ports, airports, building sites and  sports grounds around the world. Brangelina turn up at the Oscars on a tractor to highlight the plight of farmers in the third world. Soon every A-Lister has bought their own tractor and sponsored several others for use in undeveloped countries.

You run a slate tile business. An employee casually mentions how she teaches  her kids to write on your slates because that is how she learnt – and  she also finds them useful to cook on. Two years later every other restaurant and household in the land is cooking food on your slates and every retro and pound shop in the country is selling your school slates.  You even win a Literacy Award for encouraging good spelling because you sell every school slate with a pocket dictionary. You buy a chalk mine…………..

You sell ice cream but not so much during the winter months. You  create an apple shaped ice cream made of linseeds with cocoa, echinacea and molasses to create the healthiest dessert on the market. The nation loses 4 million kilos in weight in a year as a result. At Christmas you produce Christmas tree  shaped ice cream. In the run up to Valentine’s Day the ice cream becomes heart shaped. At Easter time it’s egg shaped. Shapeshifter ice cream makes you very rich.

Talking about time specific products, you sell breakfast cereals  and realise you are psychologically limiting your market to one meal a day. You create the lunch cereal, the tea cereal, the coffee cereal, the supper cereal, the munchie’s cereal or the diabetic’s or insomniac’s cereal, the alcoholic’s cereal, the hangover cereal, the anorexic’s cereal, Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter cereals, the surreal cereal, serial cereals. I can’t face typing the  word beginning with c again but you get the general idea.

Returning to the real world, in Bristol, England, the Bristol Pound was launched at the market where I work. It is our own local currency that is accepted in hundreds of shops round the city. However bank note collectors all round the world were at least as interested as us locals, buying notes that will never be spent but rather languish in their banknote collections. When I started collecting stamps I learnt that in the 1960’s countries started producing commemorative stamps and stamps with themes that were specifically aimed at stamp collectors. Eastern bloc countries did likewise to generate millions of pounds of currency for their closed economies and places I have never heard of do likewise to boost significantly their gross national product. Stamps and bank notes bought never to be used in the way they were originally intended.

So let’s talk about Icelandic pixie juggling music – and let’s face it no-one else is – you are in a band playing such music on synthesisers and bagpipes. We all know that pixies don’t buy CDs and don’t like being juggled. People into world music don’t like synthesisers and ain’t so keen on bagpipes or pixies. People who like synthesiser music ain’t so keen on bagpipes either and tend not to be that fond of pixies or juggling. It’s not looking good is it?

But your live act is unique. Whilst juggling pixie shaped ice cream,  tractors are driven over strategically placed slate tiles in time with the music. Ever seen  tractors juggle? By tapping into post-modernism and installation art you become the must see live act of the year. With your first album, Retro-Ironic Existentialism For The Erotically Challenged Man, you provide a musical backdrop for a male response to 50 Shades of Grey. You produce a video for your ‘Shooting Gammon For Robbing Banks’ song. It features 1,000,000 Bristol Pounds being burnt by stamp collectors eating porridge. You are not the first band to be successful in spite of your music and you won’t be the last but you realised the intrinsic merit of your music had  limited appeal and no obvious target audience so you made up for it in other, associated areas.

Whether it is selling  how to iron an aeroplane  manuals to life models, baby food to telescope owners, or  toothbrushes to piranhas , there is always a way to sell your stuff in a way you have never thought of, to people you have never thought of,  for a purpose you have never thought of. How successful you might be in your business may be directly linked to how imaginative you are when it comes to viewing your product in a different light, be it how it is used, where it is used, why it is used or when it is used.

We cannot all chance upon such massive untapped markets like E L James did but we can all make the effort to make our own luck.

PS – I could tell you that I realised there were people who might like my poetry who would never even think about reading it, so  I decided to write an article targeting those in the world of marketing, business and advertising to see if I could make it more likely that they did. The article ended up being called Icelandic Pixie Juggling Music, Bristol Pounds, Food, Poetry and 50 Shades of Grey……………………….