According to the definition of the American explanatory dictionary, a niche is nothing more than “A situation or type of activity specifically designed for someone’s individual abilities and character.” It is no secret that in recent years, those entrepreneurs who managed to find and infiltrate their own market niche in time are considered the most successful. There is a lot of confusion on this issue: often a niche is confused with a market segment, and the process of its search is with product positioning. A market segment is a basic marketing concept that represents groups of consumers who have similar consumer preferences. Market segmentation allows entrepreneurs to produce exactly the goods that consumers need and will be fully in demand. The criteria for choosing a market segment are very diverse, but their principle comes down to maximizing profits and finding your own niche. This is probably why today a completely new direction appears in marketing, which represents the process of searching for market niches (nishing), which includes a number of innovations in terms of product promotion and market research.
What is a niche and how does it differ significantly from the market segment?
Nowadays, for business success and the prosperity of your own business, it is important not only to accurately determine your market activity, but also to find on it that very narrow area (market segment or several segments) that is still not sufficiently occupied by competitors. Once in such a niche, a completely new type of business acquires special strength and can become a profitable and profitable production or enterprise in a very short time. The only reason to choose a niche is to transfer the game to your field or attract as many potential buyers as possible, and then use all the advantages of the owner of this small, but your own business. A market niche is a business sector or type of business that is limited in scale and has a very limited circle of potential consumers.
Characteristic features of a market niche :
- Specially individualized requests and needs of consumers, which require a certain set of complementary products and services;
- Stable, but not large potential market capacity;
- Strong enough weakening of competition.
It is immediately worth noting that the complete lack of competition does not mean that you have a gold mine and you only need to find ways to develop it. It may well be that other businessmen have already tried to cover this part of the business, but left it in time because of the complete lack of prospects. As a rule, a market niche arises when one market segment comes into contact with another, it can also be segments of different markets. It is here that very mobile demand arises, and changes in the needs and demands of consumers occur so quickly that very high production flexibility is required for their quick and timely satisfaction. If a market niche is occupied by a company, then it is no longer of interest to other businessmen, since they no longer have a place in this business. The competition process becomes meaningless, because in this case the financial costs will be much higher than profit.
Providing a significant segment of the market or several separate segments, an entrepreneur can get high profits and be fully in demand among buyers. However, only having occupied a free niche can serious success be achieved and your business can be taken to a whole new level, because this is where the key tools of international marketing are based .