Identifying a Market Niche

H O P P E R P E D I A ©
-Brian Hammons

Identifying and delivering within a market niche for a brand, product or service is what big business worldwide is all about. Utilizing traditional marketing placement strategies (i.e. price, promotion, distribution, packaging, and analysis) should be the bedrock of your business.

Positioning

Key Steps:

1.Define the market in which your product or brand will compete (who the relevant buyers are)
2.Identify the attributes (also called dimensions) that define your product 'space'
3.Collect information from a sample of customers about their perceptions of each product on the relevant attributes
4.Determine your product's share of mind
5.Determine your product's current location in the product space
6.Determine the target market's preferred combination of attributes (referred to as an ideal vector)
7.Examine the fit between the position of your product & the position of the ideal vector
8.Lastly and most importantly: Position with Power.

The Game Has Changed

Be prepared to reposition your entire company in volatile markets. The expectations of investors, employees, clients and regulators all need to shift, and your company will need to influence how these perceptions change. This is especially true of small and medium-sized companies, many of which often lack strong brands for individual product lines. In a prolonged recession, business approaches that were effective during healthy economies often become ineffective and it becomes necessary to change a companies positioning. Repositioning a company involves more than a marketing challenge. It involves making hard decisions about how a market is shifting and how a your competitors will react. Often these decisions must be made without the benefit of sufficient information, simply because the definition of "volatility" is that change becomes difficult or impossible to predict.