Click to read the original text for details ◎ Text by Liu Chunxiong People want to do niche because niche is a strong demand with stickiness; they dare not do niche because they fear it won't grow big. People want to do mass because the mass market is larger; mass hasn't grown big because everyone wants to squeeze into it, so it gets divided. It's hard to have both, but the world happens to have such logic. Let me give the answer first: Niche products can not only become blockbusters, but if they succeed, the probability of becoming a blockbuster is very high. Equating "niche" with "small sales volume" may be a subconscious misunderstanding many people have. There's even an article titled "When Niche Prevails, Are Blockbusters Doomed?" that pits niche against blockbusters. Associating niche with blockbusters may be something many haven't dared to think about. Today, I'm precisely going to argue this point. 01 Monopolized Niche, Divided Mass Marketing expert Fang Gang said: Mass is functional satisfaction, niche is spiritual identification; mass is all-encompassing, niche is picky. This sentence well explains the difference between mass and niche. Because niche is spiritual identification, its demand has a high degree of "obsessive" characteristics. Even if there are thousands of people, I go alone. So once niche is stimulated, it becomes strong demand. Because of spiritual identification, niche has a natural tendency of "niche self"; mass has a tendency of "mass conformity." Niche "actively seeks a style," while mass "passively accepts a style." In terms of purchasing tendency, niche consumers are highly independent, while mass consumers are easily influenced by the environment. In business, niche is high stickiness, mass is high substitution. High stickiness is spiritual identification, high substitution is functional substitution. In the mass market, there are always substitutable competitors, such as mineral water and mass liquor, with many substitutes; in the niche market, there are always imitations that are hard to succeed, like Xiaoming Classmate and Jiangxiaobai. Marketing expert Miao Qingxian said that the unique advantage of niche is that it's easy to become fanatical; fans are supporters and disseminators. Mass brand loyalty can be broken by countless marketing elements. The high premium capability of niche contrasts sharply with the price sensitivity of mass. The mass market is naturally much larger in volume. But because of functional substitution, the mass market will eventually form a pattern of multiple players dividing it, at least an oligopoly. The niche market, because of spiritual identification and difficulty in substitution, will concentrate on individual products (brands, IPs). Therefore, although the total niche market is smaller, the scale after monopolization is not small. It's not to say that niche is necessarily monopolized, but the probability of monopolization is much higher than mass. Of course, in the past, due to high homogeneity of demand, a batch of super blockbusters appeared, such as Master Kong's Braised Beef Noodles, Uni-President's Old Altar Pickled Cabbage, Wahaha's Nutri-Express, etc. These FMCG super blockbusters with tens of billions or hundreds of billions in sales are unlikely to appear in the future. The future size of niche should not be compared with the past mass, but with the future mass. The era of super blockbusters may have passed (individual cases don't count), but the era of blockbusters is eternal. Whether based on mass or niche. 02 Niche, Once Successful, Becomes a Blockbuster Niche is different from segmentation; some segmented products indeed have small volumes. So segmented products usually hide under the "brand umbrella" formed by blockbusters. Because sales are small, terminal profits are relatively high, relying on terminal profits to form push. The smallness of niche is not due to few consumers, but low density. Low density makes it hard to "fish out" the niche market. From a channel perspective, mobilizing niche consumers is difficult, so sales cannot be reflected. However, niche has natural communication advantages on social platforms. Because niche is spiritual identification, it has stronger communicability than mass, which is functional satisfaction. Niche forms strong communication on social platforms, and communication ignites IP. When IP becomes social currency, niche demand is mobilized and stimulated. As long as niche is mobilized, given China's population size, any niche multiplied by 1.4 billion population base is not small. I often say that for niche, even if 99% of consumers don't like it, only 1% are fans, and mobilizing 1% of fans is not small. So, looking at niche volume from a traditional perspective is wrong. As long as niche becomes a super IP, the traditional disadvantage of low density is offset by the super communication capability of super IP. As long as niche succeeds, it must be a blockbuster, even one that can compete with future mass volume. How big is the niche volume? I very much agree with Uni-President's "10 billion product matrix" view. In the future, there may be super blockbusters at the tens of billions level, but "10 billion level" is the normalized blockbuster. Whether based on mass or niche. 03 Use IP to Stimulate Niche Demand Traditional brand driving is hard to stimulate niche, and traditional channel driving cannot stimulate niche either. Mass communication like shooting birds with a scattergun is obviously unsuitable for low-density and highly heterogeneous niche; traditional channel driving is also powerless for low-density niche. IP driving based on social platforms is the natural weapon for niche marketing. The circle nature of social and the emotional nature of social sharing are precisely the basic elements of niche. On social platforms, the connection of niche groups is natural. Whether or not there are niche products, niche groups form circles. Although circles overlap, their basic feature is homogeneity. As long as there is a connection to the circle, it's easy to self-propagate within the circle. Niche based on spiritual identification naturally carries emotion. Emotion is the greatest common divisor of circle communication. So, to stimulate niche groups, the characteristics of niche itself and social platforms provide excellent cooperation. Only two problems need to be solved: First, raise the banner of IP to form spiritual identification for the niche; second, find KOLs to enter the circle. Then, sharing and communication will easily stimulate the niche group. The problem of niche lies in low density; low-density marketing relies on high-stickiness spiritual identification. Thus, niche can also form large volume. Source: Teacher Liu's Forum -END-