{"id":7771,"date":"2026-08-10T22:09:06","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T22:09:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mktmakeover.com\/?p=7771"},"modified":"2026-08-10T22:55:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T22:55:34","slug":"to-niche-or-not-to-niche-that-is-the-question-and-its-not-what-most-consultants-tell-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mktmakeover.com\/nl\/to-niche-or-not-to-niche-that-is-the-question-and-its-not-what-most-consultants-tell-you\/","title":{"rendered":"To niche or not to niche\u2014that is the question (and the answer is not what most consultants tell you)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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“Pick a niche” is the first thing most consultants tell you. Narrow your audience, narrow your offer, repeat it until you sound like a formula:<\/p>

“I<\/strong> <\/em>help [one type of client] achieve [one result] through [one method].”<\/i><\/b><\/p>

Good advice. Also incomplete, handed out as if it fit every business the same way.<\/p>

Every time someone tells me to pick one, I get a little itchy. The idea of niching down to one core offer and one type of client gives me cognitive claustrophobia. I like working across different types of problems<\/a>, seeing how they connect, and using different methods to get to the same result. I’m a synthesizer.<\/p>

The outcome I offer organizations<\/a> and individual clients<\/a> is the same: clarity and transformation. The methods, tools, and types of clients vary. And my clients benefit from it too\u2014it gives me fresh ideas, the kind of cross-pollination you only get from working on things that don’t obviously connect.<\/p>

\"\"<\/p>

To be fair, not everyone works this way, and that’s fine. Some people do their best work going deep on one thing forever. I just happen to not be one of them. But let’s argue the case between niching vs. not niching and see whether either argument holds up under scrutiny.\u00a0<\/p>

What niching down is actually solving for<\/h3>

A narrow audience and a single offer make messaging easy to write and easy to buy. Nothing left to explain\u2014the market can file you into one sentence, and a sentence is comfortable.<\/p>

There’s real research behind why this works, not just convention. Specialization helps a business accumulate sharp knowledge about one market: the language customers use, the objections they raise, where their problems actually show up.<\/p>

Studies on market orientation have found a real link between that kind of close attention and profitability (Journal of Marketing<\/a>). Niching also stretches limited resources further\u2014a small business can’t build authority everywhere at once, so a defined audience gives its content, referrals, and sales effort somewhere to concentrate.<\/p>

There’s a psychological angle too. “I help independent hotels get more direct bookings”<\/i> reads as more credible than “I help businesses grow,”<\/i> even when the broader consultant is just as capable. Specificity is a shortcut buyers use to recognize themselves without doing the work.<\/p>

That’s the honest case for niching: it reduces the number of variables a business has to manage at once. It’s a good trade\u2014for a business that only has one variable to begin with.<\/p>

When focus becomes a constraint<\/h3>

The problem isn’t specialization. It’s confusing specialization with identity.<\/i><\/p>

A business can focus its sales effort on one segment this quarter without defining its entire existence around it. That distinction matters because markets change\u2014a segment shrinks, a technology goes obsolete, a competitor redefines the category. A company that built real expertise in one market may be well positioned to expand into the next one, but only if it recognizes the capability sitting underneath the original offer, instead of mistaking the offer for the capability.<\/p>

The problem isn’t specialization. It’s confusing specialization with identity.<\/p><\/blockquote>

Prahalad and Hamel made this distinction decades ago: what a company sells today isn’t the same as its core competence, which is the deeper, collective skill that can open the door to several markets, not just one (The Core Competence of the Corporation<\/a>). Breadth without a real capability underneath it is just sprawl. But a real capability, mistaken for a single narrow offer, is a business leaving money and options on the table.<\/p>

The useful question isn’t “how many audiences can we serve?” It’s: what do we actually know how to do well, and where else could that create value?<\/p>

When the audience genuinely isn’t one thing<\/h3>

I work with companies on positioning and go-to-market. I also work one-on-one with individuals on how they’re perceived professionally. Different buyers, different budgets, different sales cycles\u2014and I have no interest in cutting either one just to make my “About”<\/a> page tidier. The two sides of my work aren’t competing for the same shelf space. They’re the same insight, applied at two different scales.<\/p>

I did the same kind of work with GrowthYears<\/a>, a brand offering burnout recovery programs and sabbatical experiences to both B2C and B2B clients. Two audiences, two different reasons to say yes. Picking one wouldn’t have clarified the brand\u2014it would have cut off half of what makes it work, because the two sides reinforce each other. People burn out inside companies. Companies only take burnout seriously once people start naming it.<\/p>

In cases like this, the audience split isn’t a lack of focus. It’s the shape of the actual problem. The mistake would be pretending the two audiences are identical. The fix is explaining how they connect\u2014which is exactly what I did for them. Their Instagram, LinkedIn, and website were all saying different things.<\/a><\/p>

I connected all three to what they actually do: help people and organizations navigate high-stakes transitions with clarity, structure, and real support\u2014whether that’s an individual planning a sabbatical or a company acting on burnout before it becomes a crisis.<\/p>

Niche your outcome, not your audience<\/h3>

A business can be defined by who it serves, the problem it solves, the method it uses, or the outcome it creates. These aren’t interchangeable. An audience niche says this is who we’re for<\/em>. A method niche says this is how we work<\/em>. An outcome position says this is what becomes possible because we exist<\/em>. The first two are useful for messaging. The third tends to be the more durable foundation.<\/p>

Take a career coach. An audience niche might be: I help women land high-paying jobs.<\/i> An outcome position might be: I help people find fulfilling careers.<\/i> The first is easy to categorize and fragile the moment the coach wants to work with a man whose idea of success isn’t only about money. The second still applies\u2014different people, same transformation. Plenty of brand consultants will still tell you to niche down to the first one.<\/p>

Audience niche<\/th>Outcome position<\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
Defines who the business serves<\/td>Defines what changes when the business is involved<\/td><\/tr>
Works well when one market has a recurring, urgent problem<\/td>Works well when one capability creates value for different people<\/td><\/tr>
Easy to explain fast<\/td>Takes longer to explain, travels further<\/td><\/tr>
Fragile if the market or the method shifts<\/td>Holds as the market and the method evolve<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/div>

A method is still a how<\/em>\u2014and ‘hows’ get copied, automated, or replaced. An outcome is what was true before the method existed and stays true after it changes. Anchor to the outcome instead of the current mechanism, and the audience question mostly resolves itself. My own line, offering clarity and transformation to both companies and individuals, isn’t a compromise between two audiences. It’s the outcome that was there the whole time, once I stopped describing the people and started describing what changes for them.<\/p>

A method is still a how\u2014and ‘hows’ get copied, automated, or replaced. An outcome is what was true before the method existed and stays true after it changes.<\/p><\/blockquote>

The upside nobody mentions<\/h3>

An outcome-based position tends to be sturdier than a narrow audience niche. Serve one industry, and when that industry contracts, you contract with it. Build around a result instead of a category of client, and you can follow demand without rebuilding your identity from scratch.<\/p>

That’s not a guarantee\u2014a broad position still needs real evidence and a credible reason for different audiences to believe you. But research on dynamic capabilities makes the underlying point well: long-term advantage depends on an organization’s ability to sense change and reconfigure itself, not just protect the formula that worked yesterday (Strategic Management Journal<\/a>). Serving more than one kind of client, under one coherent outcome, is that kind of asset. The challenge is making the center of it visible.<\/p>

When a product becomes the mission<\/h3>

This debate isn’t really about messaging. It’s about how narrowly a company defines its reason for existing versus how narrowly it defines whatever’s currently sitting on the shelf. Confuse the two, and the company’s lifespan quietly becomes the product’s lifespan. A company can have a perfectly clear mission inside a niche, or across several\u2014the audience isn’t what makes a mission coherent. What matters is whether the mission survives the product changing.<\/p>

Railroads in the 1960s United States are the classic case. They didn’t decline because people stopped traveling\u2014they declined because executives thought they were in the railroad business instead of the transportation business, and let cars and planes take a need they never fought for (Harvard Business Review<\/a>).<\/p>

Another example is Olivetti. The Italian company dominated typewriters for most of the 20th century and was also, briefly, a computing pioneer\u2014it built one of the first desktop computers in 1965, years ahead of Silicon Valley (Wikipedia<\/a>). It had the capability. It retreated to what felt safe instead, and went under once personal computers made typewriters irrelevant.<\/p>

My father owned one of their last typewriters, a “digital” one: type a sentence into a small display, fix any mistakes, hit enter, and the machine typed the whole thing out at once. It felt futuristic. It was really a company running out of road.<\/p>

Kodak’s version is messier. It invented the digital camera and poured real money into digital R&D\u2014it just couldn’t turn that knowledge into a business model that could replace film’s economics fast enough. Fujifilm faced the same disruption and reconfigured the same underlying knowledge into healthcare, cosmetics, and advanced materials instead (Review of Policy Research<\/a>). Kodak wasn’t foolish and Fujifilm wasn’t visionary. Both had the capability. Only one figured out what it meant once the original market disappeared.<\/p>

There’s research behind why this keeps happening, and it isn’t a story about companies failing to notice change. Dorothy Leonard-Barton’s work on “core rigidities” found that the very capabilities that make a company excellent can calcify into the reason it can’t adapt\u2014the skills and systems that built the business become the walls that later box it in (Harvard Business School<\/a>).<\/p>

Olivetti’s engineers weren’t incompetent. Kodak’s scientists invented the technology that threatened Kodak’s old business. Being excellent at the thing you make is exactly what makes it hard to admit the thing you make was never the point.<\/p>

Being excellent at the thing you make is exactly what makes it hard to admit the thing you make was never the point.<\/p><\/blockquote>

“<\/em>We make typewriters”<\/i> has nowhere to go once typewriters stop mattering. “We help people communicate more precisely”<\/i> can move into whatever comes next. That doesn’t mean every company should avoid a niche\u2014it means the niche shouldn’t get confused with the entire reason the company exists. The mission has to live at the altitude of a belief or a capability, not a single product, or the business inherits an expiration date it never needed.<\/p>

The real cost of staying broad<\/h3>

None of this makes the broad version easier. Worth saying plainly:<\/p>