Seth Godin

If You Want to Find Your Niche, Look For the Gap

“Give people a choice and the tail always gets longer.

”

Seth Godin

In Purple Cow, Seth Godin showed why it’s important to be remarkable. In Meatball Sundae, he shows why “New Marketing” and “Old Marketing” don’t mix.

Old Marketing, explains Godin, was about organizations—corporate giants like General Motors and IBM. The New Marketing is about starting a movement. Google, eBay, and YouTube aren’t organizations in the twentieth-century sense. They’re movements: Their growth is driven by users that are passionate about the choices that these Web sites add to their lives.

Although the Web makes it faster and cheaper than ever to spread an idea, the idea that choice matters is as old as the Old Marketing itself. Henry Ford amassed a fortune by making a car that ordinary people could buy. His Model T was affordable because it was a “one-size-fits-all” solution. In Ford’s words, it came in any color, “as long as it was black.”

By the mid-1920s Americans were more prosperous. They wanted better cars and more choices. Under Alfred Sloan Jr., General Motors offered people “a car for every purse and purpose.” Sloan’s company moved to the forefront of the automobile industry because Henry Ford, one of the greatest innovators of his day, stopped innovating.

The lack of foresight that almost destroyed the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s and 30s would undermine Sloan’s own company several decades later, after GM executives decided not to develop smaller, more energy-efficient cars. By failing to provide more choices, American companies lost customers and revenue to more innovative Japanese manufacturers, just as Henry Ford once lost markets to General Motors.

What Alfred Sloan did at GM is no different from what Daniel Neal is doing today at kajeet. Neal used gap analysis to create a pay-as-you-go mobile phone service for kids. How did he do it? It was all a matter of “homework”: He thought about the kind of cell phone he wanted his own children to have.

“Our story,” says Neal, “began with three dads (Neal and his two co-founders) figuring out how technology, kids and parents work best.” Their success reminds us that the best way to be remarkable is to give people more choices.

Over 80 years ago, Alfred Sloan discovered a gap between what Henry Ford was selling and what buyers wanted. That’s the same way to find a gap today: Analyze what the leaders are doing. Then ask yourself what they’re failing to do.

If the answer is something that people want—and something you’re passionate about—you’ve found your niche.

Is having that one great idea the answer? So many of us wish we could find that one idea that will set us free, and yet that is not the answer.

image:aussiegirl

“Ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard

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Seth Godin

Get good at creating ideas
If finding that one idea is not the answer, we need to start getting good at creating and finding ideas. There are no great ideas, there are no new ideas – only great implementations of ideas.

If you were to look at the creation process of any entity, from a product to a business, you would notice that the initial idea plays only a small role in the overall process. Yes, the idea was a factor in its success but there have been many great inventions inspired by an old idea.

The light bulb, now synonymous with ideas, went through many incarnations before it became popular.

Ask anyone who invented the light bulb and they will probably respond - Thomas Edison. Although he is one of histories most popular names he never actually invented anything, but rather adapted previous inventions and commercialized them. Humphry Davy created the first incandescent light by passing the current through a thin strip of platinum in 1802. It was Edison's research lab that experimented with different filaments to create a longer lasting bulb about 75 years later.

Innovation or sheer persistence
Marketing guru Seth Godin believes the hardest part of idea creation is all the work that comes after that initial eureka moment. You need to get good at creating ideas, "the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it", says Seth.

The key to any new idea is in its execution. Having a vague idea of some new product or business is just the beginning – all the hard work is still to come. So don't sit on that idea, set it free. Talk about it and get people excited about it. It still has a long way to go before it finds its feet and begins to run.

Be worth making a remark about
Whatever you come up with make sure your idea is remarkable – worth making a remark about. The key to the success of the idea is that it will catch the ideavirus and go viral. According to Seth, the riskiest thing you can do now is be safe, the safe thing to do is to be at the fringes. Don't disregard any bad or bizarre ideas, these are probably the ones that others have also rejected because they were too hard or too risky.

Don't be boring.