Do What Nobody's Doing: The Niche Play

The best marketing advice I give sounds too simple to be strategy: do stuff that nobody's doing. Don't do stuff that everybody else is doing. Every crowded category, generic luxury travel, generic group trips, is a bidding war for attention. An empty category is a coronation.

I once coached an advisor toward building the first luxury adventure travel brand for Black men and their circles. Notice what happens the moment the niche is named: the PR pitch writes itself, travel media exists to cover firsts. The content writes itself. The audience recognizes itself instantly. "First" is a headline; "another" is a footnote.

• Specific niches create specific economics, a stunning five-bedroom villa beats five hotel rooms on both intimacy and margin, but only a niche brand can sell the villa trip with a straight face.
• Going upmarket is an operations decision: lower-priced trips mean more transactions, more conversations, more hours for the same revenue. Fewer, richer engagements is how you buy your calendar back.
• Host the first departures yourself. The niche is a promise, and the founder is the only one who can calibrate it before handing it to a team.

Somewhere in your expertise is an intersection nobody has claimed. Name it before someone else does, because in niches, the deed goes to whoever plants the flag first.