Godin and micromarkets: an opportunity for you?

Vince Lombardi was a famous American football coach who won five championships in the 1960s and the first two superbowls. He operated at around the same time as Liverpool’s legendary Bill Shankly.

Lombardi has a great quote attributed to him: “Quitters never win and winners never quit”.

It is the sort of inspirational writing that we turn to in the face of obstacles, writes Seth Godin at the start of his book, The Dip. However, Godin says Lombardi’s advice is bad advice.

“Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time,” he writes.

“Most people quit. They just don’t quit successfully. In fact, many professions and marketplaces profit from quitters – society assumes you are going to quit. In fact, businesses and organisations count on it.”

Godin’s book on the Dip explains that there is a certain part in any journey when you don’t seem to be making progress and you quit. The tiny minority of people who are able to push through just a tiny bit longer than most accrue extraordinary benefits, he says. “Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.”

The mass market is dying, he says. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets and each one has a best. If your micromarket is “organic markets in Tulsa” then that’s your world. And being the best in that world is the place to be.

So how does this apply to a local convenience store? There are two lessons from The Dip.

First, is that you have to be clear that the dip you are in has value at the other side of it and is not a dead end.

The second is that you need to have the desire to be successful.

“Those struggling artists at the local craft fair are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level,” argues Godin. It is difficult and expensive to scale up your business idea. This is the manufacturing dip. Most people fail to cross it.

There is also a distribution dip (this is worth thinking about). “Getting your product into Walmart is far more likely to lead to huge sales than is putting it on the web. Why? Scarcity. Everyone is on the web but getting into Walmart is hard.”

So where do you think your business is situated?

Are you in a dip where you can see the profit opportunity that you will have as the clear number one convenience shop? Or are you in a dead end where you will work long hours simply to cover payroll and your taxes while other enterprises enjoy the rewards of being superstars?

In his brief book, Godin also includes a section on how to quit. While short it is brimful of ideas that will help you think about how to develop your business and yourself.

Think about this: influencing a person is like scaling a wall. If you get over, you’re in. If you don’t the wall keeps on getting higher.

Influencing a market is more of a hill than a wall. “You can make progress one step at a time and as you get higher it actually gets easier. People in the market talk to each other. So every step of progress you make actually gets amplified.”

It will take you less than an hour to read this book but the ideas could prop you up for life.
For more, see www.betterretailing.com.

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