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Niche Marketing at Work : Marrakesh Avenue
Read any book on marketing your business, and pretty soon you’ll run into the concept of “niche marketing.” For those of you not familiar with the term, this involves finding a small, specialised, and profitable market, and making it your own. So if you run a bookshop, for example, you might choose to become the bookshop of choice for architects – a much smaller market, certainly, but at least you’re not competing head-to-head with the likes of Waterstones and Amazon.
Finding a decent niche market takes a lot of work, and can be a pretty frustrating task, so it’s always encouraging when you find a great example of niching at work. One such example is a café / restaurant situated about ten minutes’ walk from my home, called “Marrakesh Avenue.”
“The Moroccan” (as it’s generally called) sits at the end of a long row of café-bars and restaurants, most of which blend effortlessly into one bland homogenous whole. If one is over-crowded, you can simply move onto the next one, barely noticing the difference.
The Moroccan is different. A few weeks back I watched as a fellow patron chatted to the owner – Mohammed – about how much she liked the ceiling lamps. Some good natured haggling later, and she left with a couple of them inside a hastily located plastic bag.
Try that at one of the rival establishments and see how far you get.
I spoke to Mohammed about it later that evening, and he explained that this is just the way these things work in Morocco. Over time, he wants to turn the entire place into a bazaar, where everything you see is for sale, subject to some spirited bargaining of course.
Mohammed hasn’t so much found a niche, as created his own. His business works because it’s completely genuine, and has the courage to risk alienating as many people as it seduces.
This means that The Moroccan remains completely untroubled when a new carbon-copy café-bar opens up the road, or an old one gets refurbished. How it would fare if a similarly exotic establishment were to open remains to be seen, but for the time being Marrakesh Avenue is a perfect example of the way in which intelligent niching effectively removes your direct competition.