Last week, I mentioned the two dictionary definitions of niches, as they pertain to individuals and businesses or markets, and went on to discuss how to find your personal niche.
Today, the subject matter is niche marketing, which is the targeting of a group or market segment by producers of goods or services. Business students already know a lot about this subject, but the frontiers of new knowledge know no bounds.
In conventional marketing, practitioners think in terms of luxury products like Rolls Royce cars, Rolex watch, designer suits etc. when talking about niche markets, but many mass market consumer products like boiled corn, roasted plantain, etc. could be packaged for top notch market like wealthy consumers who, for various reasons, can’t stop by the roadside to buy these products.
Niche markets abound everywhere. It is not just for the rich, like the powdered milk producers have proved. You have low-prized sachet milk, pure water, fruit drinks, snacks, biscuits, etc. targeted at the masses.
There are dozens of these consumer products in the mass market that jobless graduates could buy with little capital, repackage and sell to consumers at any market segment. Bean cake (akara), roasted yam, moin moin, are among many popular foods Nigerians across social class love to eat, but the market penetration of these foods are not very deep in certain segments of the market. You can package lunch packs for bankers and workers in companies or factories where no restaurant are available. That’s where niche marketing comes in.
It is always very difficult to get capital for start ups. You may have to wait till eternity to find someone to give you money to start a new business. Traditionally, investors put money into already successful projects, that’s why shares of blue chip companies get over-subscribed when put on sale.
New entrepreneurs should start business by looking for a niche market that is not already saturated, and target an essential service or product at that sector. You can carve a niche for yourself as a barber or hair dresser by doing home service. Motor mechanics, raw food vendors, medical doctors, teachers, fast food outlets, nurses, and several other service providers can open niche markets for themselves if they do a little research.
Of course, some are already doing this, but the general awareness is not yet there that a producer of goods and service could deliberately find a niche market and target it, like some producers aforementioned have done. A dry cleaning outfit in the big cities that could offer 24-hour delivery is like a fast-food eatry; it is certain to be a winner with the elite customers.
Young, unemployed Nigerians should begin to think deeply in the direction of fast, efficient, unique and reasonably priced goods or services targeted at a special group of consumers, as a way of creating jobs for themselves.
We should jettison our predilection with copying whatever is in vogue, or what others are doing, without being innovative in our thinking. Everyone has a gift or talent that God has deposited in them to get by in the world. Our propensity to consume foreign goods and services is creating jobs for foreigners and causing mass, endemic unemployment in Nigeria. That has made our mono-product, dollar-based economy not only import dependent, but weak and dysfunctional.
All is not lost, we have a vibrant, young population, that if well directed and motivated could engender a massive, dramatic turnaround of our economy in record time. All we need to do is encourage our workforce to be aggressively innovative, patriotic and dynamic in their pursuit of industrial production so that the country could become self-reliant. Public infrastructure must be put in place in earnest, and service delivery by our public service providers must become efficient.
We’d need to step up the teaching of entrepreneurial studies in our higher institutions because what we need now is a new generation of graduates, who are equipped to be creative employers, not the perennial job-seekers we currently produce, whose job destination is government offices or private enterprises.
We must fix all the fault lines if we hope to revive our economy. Meanwhile, let our youths find their bearing, discover their niches and market themselves.
Until we meet next week, Stay Motivated!
•Ladi Ayodeji is an author, conference speaker/pastor and life coach. He can be reached at [email protected] and 09059243004 (sms only).