Many companies, particularly smaller firms, struggle to properly define their target micromarket properly. The natural temptation is to spread efforts widely so as not to miss any possible prospects. For example, one company I worked with said it "focused" on eight (!) vertical markets. You can focus on one, two, possibly even three things simultaneously -- but not eight. The practical result of a "scattershot" approach is that the best prospects are inadequately communicated to, resulting in wasted marketing efforts and dollars, a mushy message, and an inordinately difficult sales process. By carefully defining and focusing efforts on a micromarket and using the proper micromedia to reach it, companies not only reduce wasted marketing spending but can also finely tune their messages to have the greatest impact on their target market, as opposed to producing lowest-common-denominator prose designed to appeal to a wide variety of prospects, and thereby being of l...

Marketing Sherpa recently published Marketing Wisdom for 2006: 110 Marketers and Agencies Share Real-Life Tips , its annual compendium of practical marketing knowledge. As always, the report features a mix of the off-beat and on-target, but provides enough creative and useful ideas to keep marketing practicians busy until next year's report is published. One item that immediately caught my eye was a paragraph in the introduction by editor Anne Holland : "The more broad the copy was, in a misguided effort to appeal to more people, the less it appealed to anyone...to write great targeted copy, you need a pile of market research to base wording and focus on. And, in trying to get campaigns off the ground quickly, we all sometimes skip that essential step." I shared that lesson in a company I was doing some work for a while back. They brought me in at the 11th hour on an email campaign for a new product launch. The copy was watered-down mush designed to appeal to the broad a...

A few weeks back, I wrote about the dichotomy of micromarkets and mass markets. On a recommendation from Tom Austin , I just read The Rule of Three -- a book which nicely ties together my musings on how small, focused companies can thrive in the shadow of industry giants. The Rule of Three, by Jagdish Sheth and Rajendra Sisodia, posits that over time, every industry comes to be dominated by three large generalists, with any number of small niche players also thriving. Examples abound: in athletic shoes, it's Nike, Adidas, and Reebok coexisting with specialists such as Saucony. In airlines, it's United, American, and Delta, with focused niche players like Southwest. Niche specialists thrive by earning high margins serving a small percentage of the overall market. Generalists focus on efficiently addressing the needs of a large share of the market. Niche companies that try to grow too fast, and generalists who fail to achieve critical mass, are in danger of falling into the...

Back in ancient times (that is, before 1996), big companies and big brands ruled the market. Then came the dot-com boom. With the internet and manufacturing lot sizes of one, virtual companies were supposed to spell the end of big brands and usher in the age of the micromarket. What we've ended up with instead is an odd dichotomy of mass and micro. On the one hand, big brands still rule in many cases: Coke and Pepsi ; Bud and Miller ; GM , Ford , Daimler-Chrysler and handful of other large auto makers. Even the internet -- supposedly the ultimate micromarket vehicle -- is dominated by Amazon, Yahoo and Google. And of course, no industry is more dominated by one brand than computer operating systems, where all alternative operating systems combined don't generate 10% of the revenue of Windows. And yet, simulateously, markets are indeed becoming more micro. When I was in high school (too long ago), there were only a handful of teen subcultures: you were either a Jock, a Ner...