How to Niche (hint: please don't)
Niching is…well, we don’t support it in this house. I have personal beef with the practice and with the needless confusion and angst it’s created for small business owners (kind of like with client personas). So here you are, a primer on why it deserves the old Thanos treatment and what to do instead.
p.s. What follows is a rant.
I had a reader ask me the difference between Stakeholder Spectrums and niching the other day. The answer was pretty straightforward, but the feelings the question conjured weren’t. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve heard anyone drop the term, so I really did think we were in a post niching world.
My mistake.
First things first, the difference:
“So when folks suggest 'niching down' what they're really talking about is tigntening your positioning. And that gets you super clear on the thing(s) that draw all your key stakeholders to you.
A stakeholder spectrum not only lets you discover who all those key stakeholders are, it also equips you to understand the priorities, perspectives and motivations of all those stakeholders too.
So it's almost like a step 1 to niching or refining your positioning.”
Here’s my beef:
Niche marketing is a thing. For sure.
Essentially it’s picking a segment of your market to focus on.
BUT YOU DON’T NICHE MARKET IF YOU DON’T HAVE A NICHE PRODUCT OR SERVICE.
Like it’s LITERALLY CALLED—
Ok.
Here’s what I think happened.
(this is what it looks like when I beg for patience)
Someone somewhere tried niche marketing for their niche product.
Let’s say gel liners for amputee athletes.
They met with extreme success.
Love that for them.
And then someone else somewhere else (a marketer for sure), looked at that success and said, “Huh, that’s it. That’s the secret to success. Everyone should pICK A niCHE.”
And NO. AbsoLUTELY NOT.
It’s borrowing tactics at it’s absolute worst.
You and I both know why niche marketing worked for the intrepid gel liner company.
Why on earth would that strategy be applied outside of this very specific, very NICHE circumstance?
Positioning on the other hand is an absolute must.
Every business or organization needs to understand
What they do
Why it’s awesome
What makes that awesome distinct
Who cares a lot about that distinct awesome.
Because, in all seriousness, those are the building blocks of every cohearent organization
And yes, I know. I KNOW, that last bit there looks a lot like niching.
Here’s why it’s not: the folks who care a lot about that distinct awesomeness don’t care about that distinct awesomeness because they have certain demographic traits or even psychographic ones. They care because of the motivational drivers that exist in their lives and those are (usually) demographically and psychographically agnostic.
Sure, as a black woman who likes grapefruit seltzer I might desperately want your thing. But my being a black woman who likes grapefruit seltzer isn’t why.
Unless you have a niche product.
And look, I don’t blame you for not seeing that.
We’ve been primed to see the who’s in our business lives as segments of demographics and psychographics.
But the math on this is pretty hard to ignore once it clicks.
And yes, I could harp on this further.
I could explain that placing yourself in someone’s network of memories requires a consistent, strategic investment of time, money and energy.
I could explain why that investment needs to remain precise, over time, for the long haul and the ways niching makes all of that harder and less intuitive for those with smaller budgets, teams or bandwidth.
But sometimes, the highest good your fellow nerd can do is to drop some simple, common sense.
You do not need a niche unless you are a niche.
And if you’ve been struggling with niching this is why.
There are many people invested in the success of this idea. That all brands should niche and your success is tied to it.
There are many people who would LOVE for you to keep chasing this.
(And there are also folks who genuinely don’t know any better. This is just what they’ve been taught).
I just thought you should know, so you can decide for yourself.
Nerd, out.