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Do you start with a product, an idea or a skill? Whatever your answer, you must find a gap in the market to focus on. You’re not likely to succeed if you go head on against a business that is already established. You must find a group of potential customers that the main players have ignored.

Think about how Nintendo spotted a gap in the crowded market for computer game consoles. It chose families, rather than teenage boys, and the Wii has become one of the marketing success stories of the last few years. A gap in the market is called a niche. It must be large enough for you to make a reasonable profit and small enough for you to dominate it.

case study AT Cross is famous for its gold-plated writing instruments that every up-and-coming executive wants to have. Rather than attacking the whole stationery market, and making every sort of pen and pencil imaginable, it has chosen to focus on the high-price niche, and has added business bags and gold-plated accessories, such as cuff links, to its exclusive product range.

 Product niche. Your product could have a unique feature that appeals to a particular market group or application. Dyson’s Cyclone vacuum cleaner is an example of this type.

 Location niche. This is usually a service, such as a local convenience store that’s open all hours, or an airport departure lounge shop.

 Customer niche. Find a group of potential customers that have similar characteristics or interests that you can easily identify. The grey market, for example, refers to people over 60. Extreme sport enthusiasts form another market niche.

 Low price niche. You could decide to reduce the quality or the number of your product’s features and sell it at a reduced price. This is what the food suppliers do with their ‘own-label’ products.

 Luxury niche. You can price yourself into a market with a high quality, stylish and expensive product. The most important aspect of this niche is to have the right image and reputation. Honda created a new brand, Lexus, to move into the luxury niche. It also built a new dealer network to distance itself from the existing Honda brand.

If you already sell a product in a particular market niche, you need to see if there are any other niches where it would also sell. Often you can make a simple modification and sell it into another group of customers. There’s more about this in Secret 3.4

You must find a niche in the market, without too much competition, where you will sell enough to make a profit.