Should KDE target a broad or a niche market?
That question has been
raised on the kde-promo list recently, and people are arguing away. The question itself is rather
valid, of course, but — and here comes the surprise — the right way to answer it is not discussing
to reach consensus. The right way is doing research.
From a scientific point of view (yeah, marketing is also a science), there’s a couple of things
that can help with answering the ‘broad vs. niche’ question. First, the strategic situation has to
be taken into account. Crossing the Chasm offers quite some insight on that topic. I’ll not go into too much
detail here, but consider two scenarios.
Imagine you want to introduce your product into a mainstream market (‘crossing the chasm’
between early and mainstream market), choosing for a broad approach is generally considered the
wrong thing to do. The right thing in this situation is concentrating on a market segment (niche)
and try to become market leader there. Rationale: Being a market leader in one market will gain you
much more than being second in several markets. Supporting technologies are developed for the
leading product, not for the second. Mouth-to-mouth advertising does not promote the ‘second best’
implementation, and there are many more situations where the 2nd winner is the first loser.
So you’ve entered the mainstream market, you have a market segment where you are the
first choice. Consider that the king-pin that initiates a chain reaction. Now you can concentrate on
the second wave of market segments to take over. Look at your strenghts, the needs of possible
target markets and use mouth-to-mouth advertising. But why not keep concentrating on one market?
Here’s why: The added support of the first market segment you took over gains you additional
resources, makes you stronger, and offers a basis to work off. Now you actually have the resources
to broaden your strategic approach.
Second, what is your product. Some product have been designed for niche markets. (To be clear,
KDE as a ‘general purpose Desktop’ is not one of those.) KDE is a platform, rather than a product.
This has certain implications on a decision for or against a niche-strategy, as I stated above. In
fact, a general purpose ‘platform’ such as KDE can be used in many niche segments. So what do we
have? A product that can easily be changed to serve as a good solution in a niche, and a product
that can easily be changed to accomplish a task in another niche. Voila, low switching costs when it
comes to ‘marketing mandates product development strategies’. In fact, consider a whole product based on KDE. Now try to work out what has to be changed to
target one market, or the other. You’ll probably come to the conclusion that those changes have to
be made in the outer ring. That’s why KDE can easily be marketed into different
markets. But there’s also a threat buried in this conclusion: The fact that we can does not mean we
should target broadly. It merely means that we could.
So the actual strategic position is one consideration for the choice “broad vs. niche”. I do
not want to advocate one or the other right now, but show that we should not ask each other the
‘broad vs. niche’ question, but we should try to answer the question “Where are we
now?”. The answer to that question mandates one or the other approach.
Yeah, mandates. Marketing is – sadly – no rocket-science. Uuuhm, sadly? – Exactly.
Here’s where the infamous bikeshedding comes into the picture.
We should be aware that one possible approach to those strategic issues is discussing it and trying
to reach consensus. It’s rather easy to have a personal opinion on the ‘broad vs. niche’ issue. But
frankly, this is wrong as an approach to get real results. Marketing has been
researched for quite some time, and trying to solve the problem by discussion does throw away all
that previous work we have available. But luckily, marketing KDE is no rocket-science. It
certainly makes sense to lay the marketing and strategic groundwork in a structured and validable
fashion – it even isn’t all that hard to do. Structured means scientific here, it means
applying professional methods. Validable means: Make it easy to follow why you took a certain
decision. You’ll need that validity in two respects: First, strategic decisions are generally
important ones. You have to convince people why your direction is the right one. People need to
understand why a decision is made. Second, you’ll be getting new data and new insight all the time.
Decisions based on longish discussions would have to be reiterated then. That does not scale.
Structured and validable strategic analyses can be reworked in the input data that have been used,
you can change only the bits that have changed.
And all that’s worth nothing if you do not open your mind for a strategy that seems
counter-intuitive.
Marketing KDE is moving towards a structured, professional approach.