(posted 6/22/98) By Jay Levinson When the marketplace is cluttered with competition, you need to cut through the clutter and stand out. Excerpted from Jay Levinson's "Guerrilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business."
Be First. If you're the first in a category, you can usually invent your own position. In marketing (as in stock car racing, child rearing and nuclear physics), no two bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. If you get to a position first, you have to be removed before someone else can take over. Here are some examples:
Warning! There are two caveats:
You don't have to be a member of the Fortune 500 to be first. Home-based guerillas can be the first in several ways:
Opportunities to combine marketing elements into a proprietary niche are virtually endless, especially for guerillas, who don't have the entire world as a customer. Remember, Frito-Lay can't afford to introduce a new product that doesn't promise to generate $100 million in sales the first year. That means Frito-Lay discards many, many snack products that would sustain a guerilla in imperial style. Barbara Coole-Richman, who started a home-based catalog for children's natural fiber clothing, is a master at finding new niches for her products. Aside from being the first to sell clothes devoid of chemicals and additives, she was also first to target parents of disabled children. Barbara took the position that she doesn't sell clothing. She sells "hypoallergenic clothing to parents, whose children have special needs," and she is very successful at it. Is she worried about Levi's, The Gap, or Wal-Mart? What do you think? Naturally, few of us have the privilege of inventing a major category. With over 15 million businesses operating in the U.S., your chances of coming up with even a minor category that's really new are slim. But all is not lost. Even if your market niche is cramped with competitors, you have two powerful positioning choices. Reposition the Competition or Reinvent a Category.
Linda Abraham edits and writes resumes and college application essays. She faced too much competition and not enough business. But once she began focusing her efforts on separating herself from the competition, her business took off. Linda realized that her competition wasn't focused on a specific market -- they were all generalists. She wrote a pamphlet containing tips on writing graduate school application essays and began giving lectures on writing personal statements, clearly positioning herself as an expert on the subject. Now any student in Los Angeles looking for help with a graduate school application is likely to hear about Linda. When Hank Walshak started his home-based marketing and public relations company in Pittsburgh, the first thing he did was position himself away from the competition. While most public relations companies try to impress potential clients with big offices, fancy meals, and leather armchairs, Hank stressed the fact that his company was small, yet attentive, and could respond to clients' needs in a more personal and timely manner. He effectively repositioned the big agencies as bureaucratic, impersonal corporations with slow turnaround times. The more the big PR firms flaunted their large staffs, big office buildings, and extensive client lists, the more they actually helped Hank improve his hold on his niche. There are hundreds of freelance writers and public relations professionals out there, but not many that cater to the construction industry. David Wood is one of them. From his experience working for contractors' trade organization, he realized that as a group, contractors are not very good at marketing themselves. So, David writes newsletters, brochures, and promotional pieces for contractors, real estate agents, and architects. Because he specializes, he is known as the expert in his field, and when people in the construction industry need marketing help, they look to David first. If you don't want to reposition the competition, your other option is to "invent" a new category. You don't have to be Thomas Edison to do this. Brand-new major categories of goods and services are created all the time by subdividing an existing category. Mail-order computers and miniblind cleaning services are good examples of spin-off categories started by home-based guerillas that grew into sizable industries. Marty Winston subdivided, or wrinkled, the concept of a PR agency to come up with an agency specializing in e-mail-driven public relations campaigns. Or you can take two concepts and put them together. Once there were educational catalogs and there were catalogs for Hispanic children. But there were no educational products for Hispanic children before there was an Iglesias-Solomon's catalog. Try this exercise: take a general description of what you do, such as sell insurance, consult, or give seminars. Now add a qualifier that exactly describes you major product or competitive advantage. You've instantly repositioned yourself in a new category. Here are some examples:
Obviously, not every potential customer is a small business owner, a strip mining company, or wants to walk on hot coals (although they may by the time you're through). That's part of the cost of finding a niche: you can't be all things to all people. You need discipline to narrow your niche, but it pays off. Can you name five successful companies that are all things to all people?
Even a giant like Microsoft, which is several times larger than any of its software competitors, ignores some products, some price points, some niches. The lesson here is that no business, no matter how big, survives without a niche of its own. Excerpts from Guerrilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business. Copyright © 1995 by Jay Conrad Levinson and Seth Godin. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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