Niche Marketing and market niches

What is Niche?

The word “niche” comes from a French word that means to nest. Niche marketing is targeting a product or service to a small portion of a market that is not being readily served by the mainstream product or service marketers. Nearly every business—fast food chains, convenience stores, even Wal-Mart—was begun to fill perceived voids in the market place. However, Niche Marketing usually
refers to small or moderate size businesses or farms that produce a specialty product or service for a limited segment of the market. Market niches can be geographic areas, a specialty industry, ethnic or age groups, or any other particular group of people. Sometimes a niche product can be a variation of a common product that is not produced and marketed by the main marketing firms.

What is Niche Market?

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market.

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

For instance, instead of offering cleaning services, a business might establish a niche market by specializing in blind cleaning services.

Why should you bother to establish a niche market? Because of the great advantage of being alone there; other small businesses may not be aware of your particular niche market, and large businesses won’t want to bother with it.

The trick to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already. See How to Find and Master a Niche Market for more information.

What is Niche Marketing?

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact.

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