🛒 Are There Riches in the Niches?
When I started in business, the goal was to reach the largest possible group of potential customers.
Total Addressable Market (TAM) was the coin of the realm. And if some of those prospects weren't interested today, or barely interested at all in your product or service? Well, that was just the price of doing business.
It was a tax on insufficient customer targeting, required by lack of segmentation tools and data.
Now, the entire structure for how you go to market has flipped upside down. Product Market Fit is the new currency.
Are there enough people out there who LOVE what you do or make so that you can profitably serve that microcosm?
In the speaking industry, you often hear "there's riches in the niches" meaning you can have a nice career speaking mostly to one particular industry (e.g. franchise, credit unions, schools).
But now the "riches in the niches" premise is being adopted by EVERY industry.
Who we buy from says something about our values. And we are more interested than ever in making sure our business partners are in alignment with our own preferences.
Even banks - not typically known to take a bold stance on much of anything - are getting into hyper-targeting. Like Eastern Bank in Massachusetts, which has won tons of awards for their LGBTQ+ support.
Which seems strikingly bold until you see data from Accenture that says nearly 50% of people would change banks (which is an incredibly crappy process) if their bank didn't share their values.
Regular = The Old Way
But what's most fascinating to me is that segmentation is now being applied not just to companies themselves, but to the specific customer experiences they offer.
We are all familiar with the regular, staffed checkout line at a grocery store, department store, pharmacy or similar.
The length of the line varies based on:
- time of day
- number of items purchased by people queued in front of
you
- the competency of the cashier
- the insistence of that one lady to write a personal check
The experience in the "regular" checkout
line is rarely great, often exasperating, and sometimes rage-inducing.
Understanding this, and also trying to boost
profits, companies rolled out that great modern invention....Self Checkout.
Self
Checkout = The New Way
The IDEA of self checkout is sound. In a hurry? Don't have that many items? Able to put items
in a bag? Confident that you can weigh limes? Control freak? Self Checkout is your savior!
Except....it's
not.
Every self checkout kiosk thingie is different. And the user interfaces are literally the worst. Comically
bad.
I once had to exchange dollars for zloty at a bank in iron curtain Warsaw, in 1989, and that process was easier than
self checkout at the CVS a block from my home.
Overall, the self checkout gives the appearance of being a big time saver,
but I'm not sure the juice is worth the squeeze all that often. This is why I keep hoping Amazon's "just walk out" technology will flourish. It's where cameras record your items and automatically get billed to your card on the way out the door. No payment interactions at all.
Slow Checkout = The New, New Way
