Niche or market segment? How to find your place in business.

According to the definition of the American explanatory dictionary, a niche is nothing more than "a situation or a kind of activity specially designed for someone's individual abilities and character." It's no secret that the most successful entrepreneurs in recent times are those entrepreneurs who managed to find and penetrate into their own niche of the market on time. In this issue there is a lot of confusion: often a niche is confused with the market segment, and the process of its search - with the positioning of the product. The market segment is the basic concept of marketing, representing groups of consumers with similar consumer preferences. Segmentation of the market allows entrepreneurs to produce exactly the goods that the consumer needs and will be fully in demand. Criteria for choosing a market segment are very diverse, but their principle boils down to obtaining the maximum profit and finding your own niche. Probably, therefore, for today in marketing there is a completely new direction, representing the process of finding niches of the market (nishing), which includes a whole range of innovations in terms of product promotion and market research.

What is a niche and how does it differ significantly from the market segment?

Nowadays, for success in business and the prosperity of one's own business, it is important not only to accurately determine your market activity, but also to find on it the narrowest area (segment of the market or several segments) that is still not sufficiently occupied by competitors. Once in such a niche, an entirely new type of business acquires special strength and can become a profitable and profitable production or enterprise in a very short time. The only reason for choosing a niche is to transfer the game to your field or attract as many potential buyers as possible, and then use all the advantages of the owner of this small, but his own business. The niche of the market is a sphere of economic activity or a type of business that is limited in scope and with a very limited range of potential consumers.

Characteristic signs of the market niche :

• Specially individualized requests and needs of consumers, which require a certain set of complementary products and services;
• Stable, but not large potential market capacity;
• A sufficiently strong weakening of competition.

Immediately it is worth noting that the complete absence of competition does not mean that you have a gold mine and you just need to find ways to develop it. It may very well be that other businessmen have already tried to cover this part of the business, but left it on time because of a complete lack of prospects. Typically, a niche market occurs when one segment of the market comes into contact with another, it can also be segments of different markets. It is here that there is a very mobile demand, and changes in the needs and demands of consumers occur so quickly that very high production flexibility is required for their quick and timely satisfaction. If the niche of the market is occupied by the firm, then it no longer represents an interest for other businessmen, since they no longer have a place in this business. The process of competition becomes meaningless, because in this case the financial costs will be much higher than the profit.

Providing a significant segment of the market or several separate segments, an entrepreneur can get a high profit and be fully in demand among buyers. However, only having occupied a free niche it is possible to achieve serious success and to raise the business to absolutely new level, after all on this key tools of the international marketing are based .