One of my favorite concepts from all of those years studying biology was the concept of the niche. An organism or creature finds a spot where the competition isn’t too intense, and raw materials they can work with, and decides to set up shop. They work with their environment and find a place where they can be successful, or they die out. Sometimes the environment around them changes, and the creature needs to adapt or perish.
The same thing is true for businesses, economics, families,you name it- as it’s true for bacteria or lemurs. If you find a niche and can exploit it to your advantage, you have a strategy for success that will carry you far. That is essentially the whole basis for great books like “Blue Ocean Strategy” (Amazon Link) that talk about finding markets where the competition isn’t fierce, or just isn’t there yet- you have the ability to own the niche.
One way businesses achieve this is by creating their own ecosystems. Apple is brilliant at this, with iTunes and the App Store- it has created a whole economy that it owns. It lets others play in the sandbox, helping diversify the entire ecosystem, making it more robust, and letting others compete to fill in the niches of best song, or best movie or best work productivity App, all the while taking a percentage, like an agent, as owner of the ecosystem or world. Amazon has done this, as has Ebay. All of these ecosystems compete at points of overlap- like a town encroaching on an animal’s habitat- but for large swaths of the ecosystem, there is less competition and life goes on pretty happily.
Finding your niche is difficult for a lot of folks, in part, because it starts with the very hard question of who YOU are, what you do best, and what you love to do. Sometimes, we can fill a niche because we are perfectly suited for a job that’s available, but if it doesn’t make you thrilled or excited to go to work every day, how are you really going to have the heart required to maximize the opportunity day after day?
Another spot of friction is when you know your talents and strengths, how do you communicate those to others is a short, coherent, easy to grasp way so they can help you find a niche that works? Some people refer to this as a lobby or elevator pitch- what is your tag line that inspires other people to be interested in you and hire you?
For example, on Twitter, I am largely known as LD Podcast, for the podcast I’ve done about learning and learning disabilities. But the important part there is really the Learning part- that transcends people struggling in school or work with things like dyslexia and ADHD. I feel I’m all about learning and teaching, and trying to find the most effective ways to make your message clear. I read business books and marketing books because these fields are all about making messages clear in order to get someone to buy something. I take all these ideas and concepts and apply them to help businesses, medical education, and other clients/niche owners to make their ideas and talents more easily understood. When you understand, quickly, what someone or some business is about, you can quickly decide whether you need that service, and you can convey that information easily to others- making the idea a virus, as Seth Godin would say. The principals are the same whether we’re talking math facts for middle school kids or marketing plans for adults or social media tools- you’ve got to be able to make a case and sell your ideas for anyone else to understand them and do anything with them. And that, in a nutshell, is about good, precise communication.
Which brings us back to science. In science and technical writing, precision is really important. I’ve spent hours struggling over a sentence or two in an abstract, trying to get the exact language as concise and accurate as possible. Likewise, in law school, your ability to win a case or argument depends on how you use language to communicate your client’s position to another, and use supporting information to convince the decision maker you are correct. In business and marketing, you have to do the same thing- use language to convince someone your product or service solves a need or problem- maybe even one they didn’t know they had. (Just ask Ron Popiel, or read about him in Malcolm Gladwell’s “What The Dog Saw“.)
In the end, it’s all about finding your unique niche where you can thrive. You need enough resources (which includes money and customers for business, often money and students for education) to make the most of the niche, and you have to be constantly willing to adapt and change with the environment. If you can’t adapt and evolve, you will likely suffer, decline, and possible even go extinct, or at least out of business.
It’s easier said than done of course. But the process starts and ends with you, not with the shiny new objects or social media tools or anything else. I’d love to be able to say Get Twitter and life will be perfect, but that’s not true. Like monkeys figuring out to poke a stick in a log to get food, it’s all about how you use that tool to its greatest effect that will bring you success, and it often involves experimentation, failure, and reinvention time after time.
I know my life is one great experiment. I think I know something, and that knowledge gets challenged. I can stick to my guns, or adapt to the new conditions. I have to apply what I know. In reading The Checklist Manifesto- How to get Things Right, they talk about two distinct kinds of mistakes we make all the time. There are errors we make of ignorance- we don’t know what we don’t know- and then there are egregious errors- when we know the right thing to do, but we just can’t seem to execute as we’re supposed to, leading to disaster.
For example, I know easily 20 different diet plan that promise to help me lose weight, but it’s not a lack of knowledge, it’s the consistent implementation over time that causes trip-ups. Part of it is programming the environment, and making doing the right thing easier than doing the self-destructive or ignorant or convenient thing. Part of it is keeping simple rules forefront in your mind, and avoiding the infinite shades of gray.
Success will be measured by how well you can adapt to the “rules” or metrics of your environment, or control the environment to your advantage. It’s how well you can fill your social, cultural or economic niche.
And that’s why studying biology and evolution is essential to everyone. Period. Know your niche and optimize it.
Tags: biological basis of business, business, education, finding your niche, ideas, malcolm gladwell, marketing, niche, seth godin, what the dog saw
Posted by Whitney on Feb 15, 2009 in
Uncategorized My kids have ADHD. I have ADHD. Having a background in developmental biology, I’ve been fascinated to learn how this whole attention thing works, and how you can manipulate attention in yourself and others. I think the reasons are obvious- if your attention is jumpy, if it’s like hanging around with someone who keeps changing the TV channels just as you start to get into a show, figuring how to wrestle that control away from someone else and learning how to control your own focus, as you want, is critical. Likewise, if you want to make sure people watch or pay attention where you want them to, knowing how to capture and sustain attention is going to be important. If I want my kids, for example, to focus on their homework, we have to provide hooks and incentives to make sure they get it done. Moral compunction only works for so long. In the end, sustaining their attention means finding way to give them a bigger context for what their learning- to make it more meaningful, interesting and relevant to them.
In the marketing world, or in the world in general, you have two big problems. The first is how to attract attention, and the second is what to do with it once you’ve got it.
The first step, gaining attention, requires you making enough noise, or getting notice or promoted by the right people. This is what Seth Godin means when he talks about making something remarkable- you have to do something worth while talking about and passing along. This means you have to have a product that is relevant and meaningful to the people you want to talk about it. If you have a crap product, a crap service, or something that does not stand out, you won’t be able to attract attention or sustain it for very long. Let’s assume for a second you have a remarkable product. Let’s assume you have a plan in place to gain the attention you seek.
Step Two requires sustaining attention. That means that people who have cared in Step One are willing to talk about your product/service/idea, and pass it around to others. It means that the people your evangelists talk to will find the service/product/idea as remarkable as the evangelists did. This means you need authentic, real opinions- the kind you can’t just pay for. If you can’t get anyone to like your product without a significant bribe/incentive, you should consider whether or not that means you have a flaw in your product. You won’t be able to sustain any sort of attention if the product isn’t relevant and doesn’t encourage people to spread the word. And if the only way you can spread the word is by bribing people to do so, you’ll never know if you have a real audience- maybe you’ll only have a purchased one.
If your product/service/idea gains momentum, it may become self-sustaining. Look at the case of the Fail Whale on twitter. The Fail Whale was a piece of art at iStockPhoto.com, adopted b y the Twitter people to show when twitter was over the limit and having “issues”. It became a somewhat beloved icon, and has even won awards for great design, now leading to a Fail Whale fan club and even making some money through swag for the original artist. The artist never went into this with the thought that her painting would be an icon for the internet- it just ended up happening that way in an organic fashion over time. The artwork caught someone’s attention, became propagated through Twitter, and now has spawned kinetic sculptures, gear, fans and more. The fail whale may not need any additional attention or marketing to make it more famous- but it sure has served to get the artist more attention than she ever dreamed of otherwise- giving her a platform for future work. You could not have done this by trying to make it famous through a blogger outreach program, through placed advertizing or anything else. It was organic growth, oure and simple, in the truest sense of Word of Mouth.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand. Attention, and its first cousin, motivation, are things we all have to understand when we think about how to spread the word about our ideas or products. In a perfect marketplace of ideas, we hope the best ones rise to the top, and the worst ones are buried. But even mediocre ideas can catch on (how else can you explain Chia Pets??) if you have can catch someone’s attention and sustain it long enough to convert that attention to a sale.
It’s always going to be more than wrapping up your ideas in pretty packages and bows and ribbons- but even good ideas need a bit of attention-grabbing before they’ll catch on. Otherwise, they are nothing more than one of many ideas floating around, hoping and praying for a bit of attention, from someone- anyone. This is where relevance comes in.
Lots of ideas are interesting- but it’s the ones with relevance that we glom onto and hang onto. I know for me, personally, there are lots of ideas I have simmering on the back burner- things that have caught my attention, but aren’t of immediate relevance or importance. But then something happens, my needs change, and that back burner idea or project is right there, just waiting to be acted on- like finding something terrific in your pantry- it’s been there all the time, just waiting for you to take notice and act. This trigger from base-level awareness to action isn’t always easy to find.
For example- Why did I go off and buy a new digital recorder when I already have one? Well, I needed one that would take a standard microphone XLR cable for a class I was teaching. I knew the Zoom H4 had such a jack, but having an H2, I didn’t really see a need for the H4 until this specific set of circumstances occurred to make it relevant in my life. What I had worked fine; but the H4 solved a problem, and it was my ambient awareness that this would solve my problem- that it was relevant to me, that made the sale. No one could have done anything to make me make this decision any sooner.
So you can’t force anyone to convert from a browser to a customer until it’s relevant to them. You can be in their attention sphere, you can make a case for why you can be relevant and solve their problems, but until they really need to solve that problem now, no amount of attention-getting will guarantee that conversion.
So for all of you who are considering whether endorsements sell products, you have to recognize that endorsements and advertising only help gain attention- they sow the seeds- whether or not they will germinate is really not up to you- that’s up to your customers alone. if you understand then what attention is and what it does, perhaps it will help you be more realistic about ROI. For conversion, you need to concentrate much more on motivation and relevance- attention is only one piece of the bigger pie.
Tags: attention, ideas, marketing, motivatio, relevance
Posted by Whitney on Dec 28, 2008 in
Uncategorized I get my best ideas when I am out doing things unrelated to work or home- I end up stumbling across something that strikes me as similar, and sometimes gives me a whole new perspective on how I deal with a challenge I’m facing. I find a whole new vein of ideas and material that I never would have considered before, and it opens up tons of new possibilities.
For example, my interests in marketing and branding were not things I set out to learn a lot about intentionally. I started hanging around more marketers, and started to absorb stuff almost second hand. I started reading more business books, and found the lessons they were trying to teach in a business context crossed over quite nicely into the world pf parenting and education. Now, several years later, there are more and more books that deal both with business, psychology, motivation and learning theory, something I had to sort of create on my own previously.
Digging a little deeper, let me explain a bit more. Marketing and branding are geared towards getting messages across in the simplest, most meaningful form possible, if they are going to be successful. What if you took these same concepts, and taught them to children? What if you taught them presentation skills and study skills as a separate class? What would happen if you taught kids that by expressing themselves clearly was more important than filling up a page with the most numbers of relevant examples, but just made a few convincing points ? What if you looked at every project as “making a case” for your ideas?
When I talk with my kids about the house rules, I can’t cover everything, and we don’t have a written manual. But by adhering to our weird mission statement about the rules- 93% are about health and safety, and the rest are about kindness and consideration- the reason behind the rules and the compliance goes up considerably. My kids want to know the Why’s about the rules, and we explain them, because they deserve to know that there’s a logic behind the rules and regulations, not just to assume it’s some whimsical fiat I am imposing because I’m bored. Because we give them the whys, and let them discuss the rules if they seem unfair, or find other solutions to the problems at hand, everyone in the house is a stakeholder and has ownership of the success or failure of the plan.
The business books I’ve read have helped me understand how to “market” my messages to my kids. It’s teaching them on how to market their messages to their teachers as well. While it’s hard for a kid to understand the grading system all the time- so often grades on projects, tests and papers seemed pretty arbitrary to me- starting to explain to them “If you looked at this paper, what grade would you give it and why?” lets them shift focus to the outside and evaluate their work with a fresh perspective. Not always a perfect strategy, but one that can be useful, at least with kids from middle school age and beyond. I may be a tough focus group of one, but if they can start to better self-evaluate, I won’t need to be the teacher’s proxy all the time, either.
Likewise, Chris Penn has done a series of blog posts about learning economic lessons by playing World of Warcraft. This is again, taking a proxy for a problem- learning about how basic economic systems work, and when they get frenzied and out of control, and applying these ideas to bigger projects. Other games, like Civilization, can teach you alot about the allocation of resources and the general competitive nature of cultures. How far can you push someone before war seems inevitable? When will someone try to bully you into a bad deal? What approach works best with aggressive neighbors?
The point here being that new ideas come in all shapes and sizes. They might strike while goofing off, reading a book outside of your typical genre, or even by overhearing people in coffee shops. Part of my 2009 plan will be to do more of the stepping out of my protectuve shell and explore more- because you never know where that new insight will come from.
Tags: chris penn, creativity, ideas, learning, perspective, problem solving
