Niche Down
Most businesses are caught in an endless, frustrating race to be just a little bit “better” than the competition. Better features, better service, a slightly lower price. It’s a game of incremental improvements that often leads to shrinking margins, constant pressure, and eventual burnout. But what if the entire premise is wrong?
Legendary success doesn’t come from being better—it comes from being radically different. The goal isn’t to win the existing game; it’s to invent a new one that you can dominate. This article distills five of the most surprising and impactful secrets to help you stop competing and start creating a category you can own.
1. Escape the ‘Better’ Trap: Why the First Step to Niche Down Is to Be Radically Different
The most fundamental mistake in business is competing on “better.” It’s a trap that forces you to play a game where the rules have already been set by someone else.
A brilliant comedic example from the movie There’s Something About Mary illustrates this perfectly: the “7-Minute Abs” blunder. A would-be entrepreneur pitches his “can’t-miss” idea for a workout video that will surely outsell the popular “8-Minute Abs.” His dream is immediately crushed when someone asks, “What happens when somebody comes up with ‘6-Minute Abs’?” This is the reality of the “better” trap—it’s a race to the bottom where you’re always just one small increment away from being obsolete.
Contrast this with a “different, not better” strategy. Imagine a town with 30 pizzerias, all competing to make the best “New-York style” pie. Then there’s Nellie’s Place, an establishment established back in 1989 by Irish immigrants that specializes in “wafer-thin-crust pies” and Irish draft ales. Nellie’s isn’t trying to be a better version of the other 29 restaurants; it offers something entirely unique. As a result, it dominates its niche, with customers willing to wait an hour for a table.
The lesson is undeniable: positioning yourself as “better” means you are playing a comparison game on the market leader’s terms. They have already framed the problem and the solution in customers’ minds. The path to legendary success is to niche down, change the conversation, and create your own game.
2. Categories Make Brands: The Uncomfortable Truth About Why You Must Niche Down
It’s the most uncomfortable truth in marketing: a powerful brand is the result of a great category, not the cause of it. Categories make brands. The reverse is a myth.
History proves this point with brutal clarity. Consider two legendary brands that learned this lesson the hard way:
- Dell: For years, Dell had a legendary brand in personal computers. But as new categories like cloud and mobile computing emerged, the PC category itself became less relevant. Dell became a “victim of category violence.” Its strong brand couldn’t save it from the decline of the category it was tied to.
- Google+: Google has one of the most powerful brands in the world, synonymous with the “search” category. Yet, its attempt to compete in social networking with Google+ was an epic flop. Why? Because Facebook had already designed and defined the category. Google’s legendary brand was “of zero value” when it tried to compete head-on in a game Facebook had already won.
The only way out of this trap is to build your own.
Instead, design your own market category. Become known for a niche you can own. That way, others will follow you. Others will be compared to you versus you being compared to others.
In a world where your audience is bombarded with up to 60,000 brand messages a day, a unique category is what provides the context to make you memorable. It’s simple: you either position yourself by niching down, or you will be positioned by others—and you probably won’t like where you end up.
3. Fall in Love with the Problem: The Secret to Designing a Niche People Genuinely Need
New categories aren’t born from solutions; they are born when an entrepreneur defines a new problem or re-imagines an existing one. No one buys a solution until they first identify with the problem. The secret to a powerful niche is to fall in love with a problem that people genuinely need solved.
Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, is a perfect example. She didn’t set out to start a shapewear company. She started with a personal problem: she wanted a smooth look under her white pants and resorted to cutting the feet out of her pantyhose. Recognizing that other women must share this frustration, she spent two years and her life savings developing a solution before she told a single person about her idea.
This wasn’t just stealth; it was a fearless embrace of potential failure—a mindset instilled in her from childhood. Her father would ask her and her brother at the dinner table each week what they had failed at. If they didn’t have an answer, he would be disappointed. As Blakely explained, “Failure for me didn’t become about the outcome, it became about not trying.” This reframing of failure gave her the freedom to pursue an idea that others might have dismissed.
Her journey highlights a powerful insight for anyone starting out:
“What you don’t know can be your greatest asset if you let it… If you don’t know how it’s supposed to be done, then it’s pretty likely you’re going to do it differently.”
This principle applies across industries. The founders of Barcade saw a problem they personally faced: “where do I get craft beer and play classic video games without lying on my couch?” They solved it by creating an entirely new niche: the “arcade-bar.” This wasn’t a niche discovered through market research; no focus group would have ever asked for an ‘arcade-bar.’ It was a niche born from the founders’ unique point of view.
The first step to a powerful “niche down” is not to invent a product, but to find and articulate a problem that people care about, even if they don’t have the words for it yet.
4. Don’t Just Go to Market, Condition It: How to Niche Down with a “Lightning Strike”
Most businesses “go to market,” which means playing by the established rules of an existing category. Category designers, however, “condition the market.” They actively teach people to think about a problem and its solution in a completely new way.
Apple’s launch of the iPhone is the ultimate example of market conditioning. Apple didn’t try to build a “better” BlackBerry by focusing on mobile email. It completely redesigned the problem itself. The new problem wasn’t about mobile email; it was about “how to live a mobile life.” By solving that problem, Apple created the smartphone category and instantly made the BlackBerry look like a relic from a bygone era.
A key tool for conditioning the market is the “lightning strike”—a concentrated set of actions designed to shock the market and grab massive attention, fast.
A hilarious and brilliant example comes from J&D’s Foods, the creators of bacon-flavored novelties. For April Fool’s Day, they launched a joke product: “Bacon Lube.” The stunt went viral, with over 5,000 people signing up for the waiting list, forcing them to actually create it. But behind the humor was a sharp strategy. As co-founder Dave Lefkow explained, “‘Despite being hilarious, it was a business move… Launching Bacon Croutons isn’t exactly newsworthy, but introducing Bacon Lube at the same time means getting on 500 radio stations, on newscasts and in papers, and we’re getting exposure as J&D’s.’” The lightning strike conditioned the market to see them as the undisputed category kings of all things bacon-flavored.
A successful niche down requires more than a great idea. It requires you to actively teach your audience to see the world from your new point of view, often through bold, focused, and unforgettable actions.
5. Build an Ecosystem on Purpose: The Force Multiplier for Your Niche Down Strategy
Every bit of success we enjoy comes from other people. A great category inspires a healthy ecosystem of customers, partners, suppliers, and influencers who become loyal subjects of the category queen or king.
Jack O’Neill, inventor of the neoprene wetsuit, understood this intuitively. His “Surf Shop,” founded in 1952, was more than just a retail store. It became a community hub where surfers gathered to trade stories and tips. This hub served as the real-world proving ground for his category-creating invention. As his son Pat recalled, Jack became a “stand-up member of the community.” When he passed away, thousands of surfers paddled out to sea in his honor—a testament to the powerful ecosystem he built.
Similarly, GoldieBlox, a toy company focused on getting girls interested in STEM, built its ecosystem by partnering with the Girl Scouts to create mechanical-engineering kits and badges. This move reinforced its core mission and deepened its connection with its target community.
Building an ecosystem is a purposeful act that requires deliberate effort:
- Strategically surround yourself with people you trust.
- Treat them better than you treat yourself.
- Form bonds that go beyond the walls of your company.
- Treat your ecosystem like customers. Maybe even more importantly than customers.
Niching down is not a solo mission. Building, nurturing, and serving a loyal ecosystem is critical to defending and growing the category you worked so hard to create.
Conclusion: What Makes You Different?
The path of trying to be “better” is crowded, competitive, and exhausting. The most powerful path to success is to stop competing and start creating. It is about harnessing the “exponential value of what makes you different versus the incremental value of what makes you better.” It requires escaping the “better” trap, understanding that categories build brands, falling in love with a problem, conditioning the market to your point of view, and building an ecosystem to support it all.
So, ask yourself: What accepted truth in your world is waiting to be challenged? What unique problem can you solve to create a legendary niche of your own?
Christopher Lochhead is a renowned figure in Silicon Valley, best known as a “godfather” of Category Design, a business discipline he helped pioneer. He has served as a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for three public tech companies—Vantive, Scient, and Mercury Interactive. Lochhead is the co-author of the groundbreaking book Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets and has authored or co-authored several other #1 bestselling books on category design. The Marketing Journal has called him “one of the best minds in marketing.” He is also a leading business podcaster, hosting the acclaimed “Legends & Losers” dialogue podcast.
Heather Clancy is an award-winning journalist specializing in transformative technology and innovation. Her articles have appeared in major publications, including The New York Times, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. Currently, she is the Editorial Director for GreenBiz.com, where she focuses on sustainable business strategy, clean energy, and the low-carbon economy. Clancy was also the launch editor for the Fortune Data Sheet, a daily newsletter covering the business of technology. She is a passionate advocate for the idea that profit and concern for the planet are mutually reinforcing smart business strategies.
Book details
- Title: Niche Down
- Explanatory Title: : How To Become Legendary By Being Different
- Authors: Christopher Lochhead, Heather Clancy
- Publisher: Christopher Lochhead & Heather Clancy
- Publication Date: July 15, 2018
- Print Length: 144 pages
- ISBN-10: 0692156798
- ISBN-13: 978-0692156797
- Category: Small Business / Entrepreneurship