Our real-world testing was highlighted in the Harvard Business Review
Make a big business by nurturing a niche network
What a difference twenty years makes! Mass media is arguably breathing its last and, with it, the mass market. ‘Micromarketing’ never quite caught on as a term—it really just became ‘marketing’—but the ‘long and chaotic transition’ is just about complete.
So where are we now? And where are we headed?
Brands used to be defined by their mass-ness. To be a brand was to be big, big, big. ‘Brand management’ took place at big companies, not small ones. With less competition and more market share, brands—and brand marketing—could operate at scale: big media channels reaching big audiences to sell big quantities.
Most discussions about the shift away from mass marketing are from the perspective of the marketers. As outreach channels proliferated, staying big required lots of hustle and coordination across a complex ecosystem. Being big became harder, increasingly a collection of small efforts across many media types.
But it’s more revealing to look at the shift from the perspective of consumers. Twenty years ago, a survey of demographically similar customers likely yielded huge overlaps in the soap, cereal, mattress, and pens each person used. We were similar in our consumption.
That’s not the case today.
Now, individuals are more, um, individual. Each person is a brand pastiche consisting of literally hundreds of brands. And no one is alike.
Sociologists talk about the atomization of culture and politics. The idea is that society has become so fragmented in beliefs that we are really just a collection of isolated individuals—the smallest niches of all.
Atomization extends to identity, and a lot of identity is expressed through what we consume. Brands recognize that they are no longer selling a good or service; instead, they are marketing a component of identity. The trick is finding the collection of individuals who share the same component but may be otherwise distinct from each other, who form a targetable niche.
So how do you market to a universe of individuals? You deploy ‘micromarketing’ or the one-to-one marketing that experts predicted decades ago.
Platforms like Google and Meta make it easy: just feed in a wide range of ad creative, and let the algorithms find the audience for your product.
Of course, ceding control of your customer knowledge and targeting to an intermediary is dangerous, as countless venture-backed direct-to-consumer brands found when new privacy rules kicked in and customer acquisition costs rose. Most of the knowledge about targeting resides with the algorithm, and your brand becomes beholden to a gatekeeper who can hold you up for information and access. It’s hard to market anywhere else.
How can you access the vast audiences of social media platforms while retaining some sort of leverage?
For all their peril, ad platforms are a productive place to identify the characteristics of niches.
Creating distinctive, discrete audience segments using ad platform targeting tools and measuring segment responses to different ad strategies tells you who loves your brand and who loves it less. You can identify and optimize customer acquisition strategies niche by niche.
The descriptors for creating audiences are vast and based on user behavior—in other words, someone with an interest in ‘Williams-Sonoma’ actually interacted with the brand. If you discover a responsive niche with interests in, say, Williams-Sonoma, nonalcoholic beverages, greenmarkets, and 8 or 10 other characteristics, you’ve learned something about your customer that you can use beyond the ad platform.
But that’s just a starting point. Marketing is now a process of niche-stacking—continually finding the next set of niches (or segments) for your brand. Constant testing of new niches—including exploring creative ways to position your brand—is the pathway to growth.
If that sounds complex, think about each niche as a dot on a canvas. Up close, some of the niches look almost the same; some look vastly different from each other. But when you step back from the canvas, you see a pointillistic painting, a fully realized image composed of niches that interact with each other to support a coherent brand identity.
