Things to Keep In Mind While Creating a Product for a Niche Market High degree of detail and attention to clients' needs and requirements is the core of niche marketing.

Serving a niche market is both good and bad news. Good because there is typically limited competition. The bad news is that customers are not very happy to work with a very limited set of vendors due to associated perceived risks and dependencies. Building customer trust therefore becomes even more crucial and any amount of investments in this direction will prove beneficial, provided it is well executed.

Build Trust

Srividya Kannan, Founder , Director - Avaali Solutions Pvt Ltd, feels building trust requires walking the talk (no exceptions), listening, authentically engaging with customers, continuing to innovate within the space to ensure value-added services to customers. However, it is also critical to keep costs under control. While these may be arguably true for any business, for a niche segment these become almost always imperative," she enunciated.

The other factor to keep in mind, according to Kannan, is continuous investments on building skills. "To stay profitable and keep competition at bay, it is imperative to invest in skill building. Keeping the existing team focused to deliver results, and constantly working towards additional skill build is a good way to stay relevant in a niche market," emphasized the young-preneur who carets to a very niche segment.

Put Attention To Details

Sunanda Kashyap - owner and designer - Crazymee Bespoke Stationery, a bespoke graphic design company catering to extremely niche segment, considers high degree of detail and attention that you have to give to a client's needs and requirements, to be the essential core of niche marketing. "The client has to feel extremely satisfied that their own ideas and insights have also been heard and included in any specific design," she reiterates.

Secondly, each design has to be unique so new clients are attracted to the exclusivity of the service. None of Kashyap's bespoke stationery or invitation designs are repeated twice.

"Another, important aspect is the quality of products. Niche products have a high price point due to the amount of design time required per product. The end product has to reflect the effort and time spent in creating the product and that can only be translated through the use of high quality printers and materials," she informed.

Be Unique

Vishwavijay Singh, Co-Founder, Salebhai.com, on the other hand asserted that one of the first things to keep in mind while catering to a niche market is that individuality of the product takes centre-stage. "Rather than offering rasgulla, a Bengali will be more delighted if he is offered a rasgulla specifically from Kokata," he quipped.

Secondly, for Singh, catering to a nice market means knowing the right audience to target. "If you can find the exact demographic your product is meant for, you have the most key element figured out," he notified.

Next for him is the customer support response. He feels that for the niche segment this will need to be different from other brands catering to a wider market.

"For instance, when a customer has some complaint regarding their product, we let them keep the product and either process a replacement as well as give them 100% refund. This is unlike the return/replacement policy of other brands wherein they first must receive the defective product before processing a replacement or refund," he illustrated.

"Lastly, rather than talking about your product to a niche market, you have to connect with the audience. Whether you connect emotionally or inform educationally, your value proposition must be more than just the materiality of your product," concluded Singh.