Choice: Your Most Valuable Asset

If You Want to Find Your Niche, Look For the Gap

“Give people a choice and the tail always gets longer.

”

Seth Godin

In Purple Cow, Seth Godin showed why it’s important to be remarkable. In Meatball Sundae, he shows why “New Marketing” and “Old Marketing” don’t mix.

Old Marketing, explains Godin, was about organizations—corporate giants like General Motors and IBM. The New Marketing is about starting a movement. Google, eBay, and YouTube aren’t organizations in the twentieth-century sense. They’re movements: Their growth is driven by users that are passionate about the choices that these Web sites add to their lives.

Although the Web makes it faster and cheaper than ever to spread an idea, the idea that choice matters is as old as the Old Marketing itself. Henry Ford amassed a fortune by making a car that ordinary people could buy. His Model T was affordable because it was a “one-size-fits-all” solution. In Ford’s words, it came in any color, “as long as it was black.”

By the mid-1920s Americans were more prosperous. They wanted better cars and more choices. Under Alfred Sloan Jr., General Motors offered people “a car for every purse and purpose.” Sloan’s company moved to the forefront of the automobile industry because Henry Ford, one of the greatest innovators of his day, stopped innovating.

The lack of foresight that almost destroyed the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s and 30s would undermine Sloan’s own company several decades later, after GM executives decided not to develop smaller, more energy-efficient cars. By failing to provide more choices, American companies lost customers and revenue to more innovative Japanese manufacturers, just as Henry Ford once lost markets to General Motors.

What Alfred Sloan did at GM is no different from what Daniel Neal is doing today at kajeet. Neal used gap analysis to create a pay-as-you-go mobile phone service for kids. How did he do it? It was all a matter of “homework”: He thought about the kind of cell phone he wanted his own children to have.

“Our story,” says Neal, “began with three dads (Neal and his two co-founders) figuring out how technology, kids and parents work best.” Their success reminds us that the best way to be remarkable is to give people more choices.

Over 80 years ago, Alfred Sloan discovered a gap between what Henry Ford was selling and what buyers wanted. That’s the same way to find a gap today: Analyze what the leaders are doing. Then ask yourself what they’re failing to do.

If the answer is something that people want—and something you’re passionate about—you’ve found your niche.