One Devastating Mistake in Positioning That's Going To Destroy Millions of Businesses. Guaranteed
Surefire Way To Ruin a Good Business: Choose a Micro Niche with Zero Strategy/ Understanding/ Clarity
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Introduction
Today, it’s unfortunate to see so many “coaches” offering such horrible ideas to their participants/ that literally run the business of their participants to the ground.
When someone comes to a coach, and asks them for mentorship, they go to the coach with a lot of hope, and some coaches are just a firehose of bad advice.
One such horrible advice that I see often saying is, “every business/ sector is saturated now, or will be saturated soon. Stop focusing on the niche. It’s time to go micro-niche.”
Can’t remember the last time I saw someone fall prey to words that are technically correct but can cause so much collateral damage.
Let’s decode the mystery of the “micro-niche” today
The Niche
First things first, let’s just quickly brush up the basics and let’s understand what exactly a niche is.
For now, I’ll just use an example of the restaurant industry, and later I’ll explain the theory in detail.
In the world of restaurants, would you feel comfortable to eat at a restaurant if it serves you Indian, Thai, Italian, Mongolian, Chinese, Mexican & Vietnamese cuisines under one roof?
The market of restaurants today has matured enough for most customers to understand that every cuisine requires a specialised skill set, and a good restaurant worth their salt can’t offer more than 2 (maximum 3) cuisines and still do justice to the flavours of all the dishes in the menu.
Think carefully, can you remember the last time you ate at a restaurant that serves 4 or more cuisines and do you really like frequenting such a space?
I think not more than 1% of people would be able to come up with an example of such a restaurant.
Hence, when a restaurateur decides that their restaurant will serve 1, 2 or 3 complementary cuisines in their brand, that’s called choosing your niche/ speciality in your business.
The micro-niche
Now, let’s understand the need/ importance and the strategy of micro-niche.
Take Chinese food for example. I’m sure if you live in a city, you’d know of at least 4-5 categories of Chinese food.
01 - Street side Chinese food stalls that serve you extremely economical food, which most people generally choose only for takeaway
02 - A local restaurant which is barely 1-2 notches over the street side stall and serves economical food and caters to a very particular section of the audience
03 - A quick service restaurant (QSR), the kind that have multiple locations generally in a food court/ mall that serves standard quality food.
04 - A fine dining restaurant that serves quality Chinese food selection and you’d also find some dishes like dim sums, some specific soups that are not available at the local restaurants
05 - An ultra fine dining restaurant that serves some exotic dishes and a wide selection of cocktails with ingredients and recipes that are so exquisite that you can’t even imagine/ expect to find these dishes in other “Chinese Food Restaurants” who are not of the similar category.
Should every business have a micro-niche?
Now that we have a specific understanding of how micro niche works, do you think every business needs a micro-niche?
Or rather, let me ask you the real question, “isn’t every business already operating in a micro-niche?”
The audience of a roadside stall, the local restaurant, the quick service outlet, the fine dining and the ultra-fine dining restaurant are anyway segregated through their pricing, the ambiance, the marketing done by the brand, and the audience they cater to.
Trouble is, just because you don’t know/ understand the technicalities, your coach might be giving you information that ends up confusing you more than the amount of clarity (if any) that they may bring.
How to make sense of this?
Your target audience, your product offering and the price at which you’re planning to sell determines the micro-niche of your business/ brand.
If you want to sell high ticket, you will have to create an offer, create content that caters to the pain points of the high-ticket customers.
Premium customers pay premium prices but also demand premium services, premium (read: fast, effective, foolproof, well delivered) solutions.
Everyone wants to cater to the premium customer, but if you don’t have the experience, the expertise, the mindset to deal with the premium customer, and if your coach is telling you to blindly cater to the premium audience, I really wish you start contemplating seriously.
If you’re catering to a wide audience (professionals working in the IT industry for example, you will have to come up with an offer that’s easy to accept for the widest sections of professionals in the IT industry.
Once they become your customers, after having delivered all the promises made to them, that’s when you can offer them a second product/ service at a higher ticket.
Imagine how airlines give you competitive prices at the time of booking the ticket, but when you’re at the boarding pass section, that’s when the executive will offer you an upgrade at an additional cost. That’s when they’re trying to get you from the niche to the micro-niche section of the plane.
When you finalise the ticket at the box office (digital, or in the real world) you will be given an offer to buy food and beverage combos at a discounted price.
That’s the brand trying to get you to upgrade to the micro-niche.
On the contrary, a five-star hotel is already a micro-niche in the industry. The pricing, product offering, service delivery of such a business is class apart right from the word go.
The luxury car brands are already operating in the micro-niche. They don’t want to cater/ sell to 80% of people who aspire to/ want to buy a car.
I repeat myself.
Your product offering, your target audience and the pricing of your product are automatic determinants of the sub-niche of your business.
Conclusion
I hope this post reaches a wider set of audience because I see more and more people struggling with their micro-niche every day when the solution is a lot easier than they realise.
Thank you for reading till the end. I hope at least you got the clarity for your business that you were looking for.
Your Thoughts!
If you feel you’re absolutely lost or if you feel you need more clarity with your niche/ positioning/ your personal brand/ your content strategy and would like to consult with me for the same, feel free to reach out to me and let’s connect.
If you’ve reached till this point of the post, I’m sure you must have some thoughts/ feelings/ opinions about what you’ve just read.
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P.S.: Image made on Meta AI using the prompt, “Imagine an entrepreneur in tears because they are shutting their business”