Niche to See You: Value Edition
There's Value to be found right around you - literally!
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If you’re in any type of business, organization or creative endeavour where part of your work is considering competitors or other players in your environment, then you’ll have heard of the term niche, or niching, or its corporate dressed older sibling, niching strategy. You’ve likely been at the pointy end of this stick when trying to boost your enterprise or endeavour’s competitiveness.
Very basically, niching it’s a way to know and describe where you sit in the environment that operate within. The idea is to either capture or create your very own slice of that environment that maximally appeals to your target client, and in so doing, capture their attention and engagement (be it in sales, donations, listens, etc.)
With that definition, I’m sure you can already see that getting a good grip of your niche and niching strategy can have an incredible impact on Value creation.
In fact, it has such an big bearing on Value creation that it has a very specific and specialized place both within the Value Innovation methodology and the Vivre Value Mapping framework itself!
(and just as a quick refresher, here’s a look at the framework - remember, we use the framework as a tool to visualise Value creation opportunities in an enterprise’s internal and external environment!)
Niche Analysis?
The name of the third sector in the Vivre Value Mapping framework!
With the understanding that no business, non-profit or creative venture is an island, and much of their strategic and operational decisions are made in response to outside stimulus, Niche Analysis is the first place where we start taking that outside stimulus into account when we’re discovering Value opportunities and formulating Value Strategy.
At its heart, 2 things are happening in Niche Analysis:
We’re looking at the niche and everyone’s relative proximity between each other in that niche:
how ‘close’ are we to our competitors?
as in, the degree of similarity in offerings, enterprise type, enterprise size, resource availability and use
how ‘close’ are our competitors to our target client or partners?
as in, how accessible are our target clients or partners to our competitors
”what brings the competitors closer, or makes them more accessible, to our clients more than us?”how ‘close’ are we to our target client or partners?
as in, how accessible are our target clients or partners to us
”what brings us closer, or makes us more accessible, to our clients more than our competitors?”
Using the insights from all these proximities to uncover Value opportunities that we can leverage to set ourselves and the value we provide (our Value Proposition) apart from everyone else
The point of Niche Analysis is understanding everyone’s proximity to each other in the niche and leveraging that proximity to create Value.
But ultimately? What we’re looking to do in Niche Analysis is to get ourselves as close to the target client, donor or stakeholder as we can, and more importantly, closer than the competitors are
You might have been reading along and thought “this sounds an awful lot like competitor analysis”.
Well, you can consider Niche Analysis as “Competitor analysis ++”
Competitor analysis has you specifically study your competitor(s) for gaps and strengths, that you then compare against your own capability to see where you can outpace and outperform them. True enough, that outperformance does create Value.
Likewise in Niche Analysis, there is an element of studying the competitor.
Niche Analysis differs from competitor analysis in that the whole niche overall is the scope, not just a couple competitors.
It’s you, the competitors AND the target clients or partners, and the interplay between you all, that is under scrutiny.
If this has been a little daunting to grasp or a practical example is you need, no sweat! I’ll be taking us through a case study in next week’s edition!
Niche Analysis is actually one of my favourite sectors in the framework.
As for which one is my ultimate favourite, that’s a matter for a different edition!
If Niche Analysis is piquing your interest and you’d like to see how it can be leveraged to create Value in your business, non-profit or creative venture, I’m exactly who you need to call!
Click right here to pop me an email!
Week by week we’re making Value creation less of a mystery and more of an active possibility. Ha
Tell me more in the comments, drop me a line on LinkedIn, or if you received this an email, send me a reply!