Seeing the wood from the trees .......

 

 

Finding your Niche

Alex Deane was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1922 and he quickly discovered a flair for writing as well as a love of the adrenalin charged sport of parachuting, so as a young man he started writing books about parachuting and other low-cost aerial sports. Not much of a market for these, you may think; and you'd be absolutely correct, most people if they saw them on a bookshelf would simply pass by and look for something a little more to their own tastes. The difference between Dean however and more unsuccessful writers is that he had a flair for marketing. He didn't offer his books to the mainstream publishers because he knew that even if he could persuade them to stock them they would never sell very many of them anyway, so what he did do was quite simple. He published the books himself, so cutting out the middleman; and he sold them directly to parachuting and skydiving clubs, hang glider associations, at paragliding exhibitions and to the United States Parachute Association. Needless to say they sold well, and since he was able to charge a reasonably high price for the books (let's face it, he didn't have a great deal of competition did he?) he made quite a decent profit from them. He very quickly became well-known within parachuting circles and his books sold steadily for more than 30 years.

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What has this got to teach a marketer? It is all about finding a unique, or practically unique, niche. One of the main keys to selling success is to offer your product directly to those people who would benefit from it the most, and if that product is one which is not easily available from a competitor then it is possible to charge a premium price for it and to expect a good level of sales.

Had Deane attempted to sell millions of books at a low-price through conventional outlets he would have failed dismally, but he didn't do that. Had he been the most brilliant writer that the world has ever produced, failure would still have been inevitable but he succeeded not because he was a particularly brilliant writer (even though some may consider that he ticked all the boxes) but because he decided that his product was be a series of books on the subject for which there were no real, obvious competitors; and he offered the product directly to the market that he knew was the most likely one to purchase it.

 

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