Culture Conversion: Designing for Niche Markets
A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market… or a narrowly defined group of potential customers. In general, if your business focuses on a niche market, you should be addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers.
Unless you are in the community being targeted, it can be hard to tell upfront whether the design of your creative is going to be effective. But when you’re part of the targeted community, you get the message loud and clear. The trick comes in when you want to target a niche market to which you yourself do not belong. Bridging this gap between business and niche markets thus often requires a thoughtful cultural conversion campaign
The concept of cultural conversion in the creative field is very important when designing materials for niche markets. Once a base concept is defined, your need to evaluate the viability of your message within the context of your specific target markets. Advertising is about emotion. If something in your concept is offensive to a particular group, it needs to be addressed. Similarly, this type of evaluation can help to highlight latent strengths in your concept, which can be played up to maximize efficacy for that market. If the concept translates well, then you can begin to refine your message, creating highly targeted language and visuals. If it doesn’t, then you have the luxury of reworking the concept at an early phase until it does.
Cultural conversion evaluations have the ability to capture both intellectual and visceral nuances in a concept. One of the core properties of a successful ad campaign is the presence of a direct perceived connection with the audience. More campaigns today are veering away from the staid and safe language of standard sales copy, and are instead delving into the expression of more raw and emotive concepts… and niche audiences are loving them for it. It can be a heady trip, and a tight-wire act… any campaign that leans heavily on emotion is taking a chance. However, when you hit the right note, the rewards are undeniable.
Correctly targeted and expressed emotion in marketing can also lead to fierce brand loyalty – your market connects with you on a personal level… not just a practical one.
As business owners, we always want to make our brands bigger… more effective, more important, and more relevant. The style of marketing you use should excite the people who buy your product. And in order to do this, you need to know who these people are, where they live, what they love and the values by which they live their lives.
Targeting is more than just using photos of your niche market in your advertising materials. A properly composed marketing campaign needs to target for a culture… which is more than just fashion. To target properly, you need to understand your market’s entire mind-set, while avoiding stereotypes.
The approach you choose to take in marketing vis-a-vis its returns can be likened to your investment strategies. You can develop safe, palatable solutions that have a predictable but somewhat lackluster return, or you can aim for high returns by taking a risk, stripping down your brand and pointing that arrow directly at your market’s heart.
Sage Media is an international corporate design firm based in Ottawa, Ontario.
