JUST NICHE IT!!

 When you get down at any railway station, you pass through a multitude of small carts and shops in the market selling attractive items. Some top-of-the-shelf items include key-chains, belts, caps, cups, while some cater to satisfying the traveller’s hunger. One peculiar characteristic is that they resort to various innovative techniques to attract potential buyers. Some shout hard, some put up an alluring display, while some modulate their voice impressively to market their items. What’s true is that despite going through this scenario almost every day, we don’t realise that we are constantly passing through a variety of niche markets. But even the most creative of ideas are doomed to failure if the identified customers don’t wish to put their money on the product or service.

As mentioned earlier, intangibles like services can become a crucial niche market. For instance, when cooking shows like Masterchef, Top Chef and many others prevailed on premium TV channels, channels like ‘Food Food’ depicted a series of shows covering every possible cuisine. Talking about niche TV channels and shows, one of the oldest memories for Indians can be ‘Telebrands’. We can narrow it down to the fact that they targeted the TV shopping segment as a niche market, and the TV shopping industry ultimately boomed with a host of other new entrants like Homeshop 18, Star CJ Alive and others.

However, a noticeable fact is that niche markets are not easy to locate, but in some cases, they do stare at you. This is what ‘Crack’ cream achieved with a niche product for cracked heels. Hardly anyone would have thought about developing such a product; Paras Pharmaceuticals achieved it. The next, but another pivotal consideration is the feasibility of the idea. There are numerous examples of products that failed to capture the minds of the niche audience.

But what exactly is a niche market? From the above citation, we can suggest that a niche market is a product belonging to a specific interest of a consumer. For instance, if you want to buy a cell-phone cover, you wouldn’t look for it at a shop selling leather belts. Or if you want to purchase a packet of chips, you wouldn’t search for a flower shop. Niche markets comprise of a specific group of people with common needs. This can either be a tangible or an intangible need.

Niche marketing is locating customers who use explicit products, understanding their need for the product, integrating such a product and selling it to them. It principally involves finding your potential customers according to their need. But shooting arrows in dark might not help. Thinking of an idea, and more importantly, understanding their feasibility in the market are critical elements in niche marketing.

So how do you begin your career as a niche marketer? As mentioned earlier, it is an idea that triggers the entire niche marketing process. However, care must be taken that the niche is selected such that it satisfies the distinct set of needs of the customer. Since this occasionally begins as a new start-up, the niche must be selected in such a way that there is not much competition in the market, so as to capture the attention of the people and take over mind share.

The most recent example can be Tata Nano, which was targeted towards the middle class and lower class as a ‘cheap car’. Due to shortcomings in the car, the buyers’ perception towards it negated, ultimately causing ‘nanosales’ of Tata Nano. This also explains why product quality on the basis of a brilliant idea is necessary to appeal to the niche audience. But even before translating an idea into a niche product, the most important job is toanalyse the‘sweet spots’ in the market. These are niche markets, which you target in order to promote your product and make sure the target consumers buy your product. Some experts might say that idea is the most important step, while some might ideate that finding such a market is critical. In reality, the perfect combination of idea, feasibility and identification of need is the reason for a successful grip over a niche market. At the top of the model lies the basic need of consumers from a marketer’s point of view. Multi-national companies (MNCs) are moving towards identifying needs of a specific group of customers. Colgate has a variety of toothpastes, but they launched a brand called ‘Visible White’ for consumers more apprehensive about yellow teeth. With attractive ad campaigns, MNCs push for their product in the respective categories by line extension. However, due to a well-established base, MNCs find it easier to market their niche products. For entrepreneurs, the perfect amalgamation of customer need and idea, encompassing the top three levels of the model, is essential to establish and grow their business.

Based on these theories, let us go through the ‘NICHE’ model for success in niche marketing.

They must look for what big companies have missed out on. That is exactly what Mr. M. Manal, the founder of Himalaya, targeted in 1930. He wanted to bring to notice the application of Ayurveda in a modern-day format. Today, Himalaya is acknowledged for its presence in almost every medicinal application. The consumer plays a momentous role in any niche market. There is no point in designing a product that fails to capture the attention of the consumers. But if it delivers its promise, the consumers ignore the price component of the product. Ferrero Rocher chocolates are priced so high that a box of 24 pieces costs Rs. 675. However, consumers love the rich hazelnut flavour filled with chocolate so much that they don’t care about the price and buy it nevertheless.

Consumers are important because as natural instinct comes to them, they are always looking out for options in a particular range of products. That is where competition of products arises.

Hence, a niche must be chosen such that there are minimal competitors in the field. If your idea is to get a low sugar cold-drink in the market directed at college kids, you are in the wrong zone. In that case, be ready to be usurped by Pepsi and Coca-Cola, along with a negative P&L statement. What is also important is giving proper heed to consumers. Their criticism of your products needs to be taken positively and changes need to be incorporated in your product based on their inputs. If a revised product is speedily brought into the market, the customer will feel a sense of satisfaction that you listen to their needs. Customer heedfulness is a critical point in niche marketing. The internet has become the cheapest way to market a range of products. Niche marketers have benefitted from the wide usage of the internet around the world. It is easy to create a website with hardly any cost to sell your products online, and inventory management does not need more efforts in such cases. We learnt this the easy way through websites like Amazon, Flipkart and many others who identified consumer comfort by ordering products online and bringing them to our doorstep. Advertising on the internet is also an easier and cheaper means of attracting consumers. There is product-centric selling which allows more focus in developing the product features suiting the consumers. With clearer focus on selling the niche product, it attracts less competition and you can leverage on the strong foothold of your product in the niche market. The world has undeniably benefitted from a host of niche products. We can talk about big names in the industry that started off as niche companies. Talk about Google, the leading search engine in the world, which identified the need for people to remain updated and get an easier way to search information. Also, we can think of Orkut and Facebook which provided a new outlook towards social networking. With a boom in socializing made evident, LinkedIn thought of socializing working professionals and captured the essence instantaneously. Moving from the online media to food, we have niche brands like BabuVada-pav and Jumboking which segmented the famous Mumbai Vada-pav and delighted customers. What products and brands we know today were actually developed by the niche market visionaries who identified the need at the right time and achieved success using their own unique methods. If you have an idea in mind, that you feel can appeal to the consumer with hardly any competition, it needs to be seriously considered. Hence, why don’t one just niche it?

HBR ARTICLES SUMMARY

I've just read 2 HBR articles on marketing and more, and I'm actually amazed by the marketing magic and logic. Here are the extracts of the 2 famous marketing articles from Harward Business Review.

DECISION-DRIVEN MARKETING

The article ‘Decision-driven marketing’ by Aditya Joshi and Eduardo Gimenez is an interesting read dealing about the marketing concepts and nuances that are of par importance in addition to the normal sales and general marketing. Marketers have always had to build brands, create demand, promote sales, and help their companies earn customers’ loyalty. But today’s turbulent environment means they must play critical new roles. 

As the marketing pioneers have discovered, a more fruitful approach is to identify the critical decisions involved in successfully marketing a company’s products or services and focus on improving the effectiveness of those decisions. In essence, the leaders of these companies inject more discipline into decision-making processes—clarifying roles for marketing and other relevant functions and establishing decision criteria. Some companies also need to consider the organizational changes. Typically three different categories of marketing-related decisions were considered to be the crux factor: Strategy and planning, execution decisions and operations and infrastructure decisions. Even I.T as a functional tool to help marketing is evolving nowadays. Ample examples are given to uphold these requirements. 

To conclude, the article asserts on the fact that apart from general sales and marketing, various other functions need to be identified and worked upon, and organizations that identify the most important decisions and learn how to make them more effectively will be on their way to better and more powerful marketing.

THE ULTIMATE MARKETING MACHINE

The article ‘The Ultimate Marketing machine’ by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, and Keith Weed is an interesting read on what marketers do to engage customers and the change that has evolved beyond recognition. Tools and strategies that were cutting-edge just a few years ago are fast becoming obsolete, and new approaches are appearing every day. 

The authors have described a framework for how marketing leaders can build a high-performance marketing organization and thus creating an ultimate marketing machine. Marketing leaders are effectively connecting marketing to other functions and business strategy, inspiring their organizations by engaging everyone in the brand’s purpose, focusing and aligning marketing around a few key priorities, and building internal capabilities through extensive training. A few brand examples are also given where a single brand purpose was developed rather than the decentralized approach, and such approaches have always worked their ways.

To conclude, the article enunciates that marketers must look into customer insight, impregnate their brand with a brand purpose and deliver a rich customer experience. Invest in training, connect with the masses and develop and build a brand purpose to deliver this rich customer experience.

WHEN TOO MUCH OF SOMETHING IS BAD

What do you say to your friend when the college officials ask for another copy of some certificate, for reasons best known to them? Well apart from a few choice abuses, you ask your friend to quickly go and xerox that certificate at the nearest shop while you wait in the office.

When you go to the mall with no particular purpose, what better way to waste time than walking up and down escalators? When you see an interesting display that you wish to know more about, you whip out your cell phone and google it.

When you fall down and hurt yourself, you usually apply a band-aid on top the bruised area. When the winters give you flaky or rough skin, you apply vaseline on it to smoothen it out?

Why am I emboldening these select words, you might ask? What most of us don’t realize when we use these words in the generic sense, are that these are actually companies and brands. Xerox is just a company that manufactures photocopying machines. Yup, that’s what it’s actually called. So does Canon, and a bunch of other companies. But you never ask your friend to Canon your certificate do you?

I wonder what a Xerox executive might say to that.

An escalator was originally a trademark of the Otis Elevator Company, for their invention of the moving staircase.Band-aid is in fact the name of Johnson & Johnson’s line of adhesive bandages. Vaseline is the name of Unilever’s line of petroleum jelly. Google is, well you all know what Google is.

Okay no more bold words, I promise. However as you can see, for so long now we have been interchanging brand names with generic ones. These are generic trademarks. Sounding something like an oxymoron, it is a trademark or a brand name that has become synonymous with a class of product or service. There are plenty of other examples, such as Bayer’s Aspirin and Heroin (yes, that used to be a brand at one point), the Phillips-head screw which obviously is named after a Mr Phillips (Henry F. in this case) among many others. While it has certain inherent advantages, most companies don’t prefer their brands to be in this situation. Let us see why.

A trademark or a brand ceases to lose its distinction and starts becoming generic when it has achieved market dominance and has captured the customer’s mind space. After a brand has become successful enough, the customer starts to associate the brand with the commodity. So the fact that your brand name is a generic trademark means you did a few things right. Congratulations. So why aren’t these above mentioned companies tapping their heels and ‘singin’ in the rain’, so to speak? It’s because too much of something can sometimes be bad.

Your brand becoming a substitute for a generic commodity does not translate to higher sales; quite the opposite in fact. Let me illustrate with an example. Hansaplast is also a company that manufactures adhesive bandages. They too call their product band-aid, because most people would wonder what adhesive bandage means. When you go to the chemist and ask for a band-aid, there’s no saying whether he’ll give you the Johnson & Johnson’s one, the Hansaplant one or perhaps the Savlon one. Technically speaking, when you ask for a band-aid you should get a Johnson’s product. But you probably won’t.

Hansaplast with its packaging being suspiciously similar to Johnson & Johnson’s.

So you see what’s happening? When a brand becomes too popular and enters the domain of the generic, the company starts to lose control over its intellectual property rights. Competitors can now use your brand name as a generic word to describe their similar products and eat into your market share. Therefor companies must guard against this happening. While they naturally love to maintain a healthy market share, companies consciously try to prevent their brands from becoming generic trademarks.

Some of the companies that successfully brought their brands back from the brink are Nintendo with their game consoles, Microsoft with Windows and Lego with their toys that used to be called ‘legos’. Adobe too is trying to clamp down on the usage of their Photoshop brand to be used to describe the process of alteration of photographs, but with mixed success.

Here in India, Bisleri is one such brand that apparently has become a generic trademark, although I have not heard too many people ask for a ‘bisleri’ at hotels or cafes. Another brand that has most definitely become generic in India is Cadbury. It is quite freely used to describe chocolates of any kind and make. The same is valid to a certain extent for Pepsi. Aerated drinks are called ‘pepsi cola’ quite often, brand regardless.

As you can see, sometimes there are unexpected fallouts of the success of your brand. A company must be constantly vigilant regarding the situation of its brand, and make corrections whenever necessary.

So there’s my little take on generic trademarks. Let me know what you think of it, as feedback always helps. Hope it was illuminating.