IN this book the author examines how innovation and profitability are moving from the middle of the market to a series of highly defined but globally scattered niches bound together by the reach of the Net. It is essentially about a world in which no size fits all, and in which anyone who tries to be all things to everyone ends up as nothing to anyone. It offers insights into how we behave when faced with a bewildering range of choices, why it’s easier than ever before to find what we are looking for and what happens when we all want to be different.
The missing middle has its origins in social changes going back many decades, but it has recently gathered pace to become the single most important social phenomenon of our times. The middle has withered at such different rates in different walks of life that many of us have failed to appreciate it. Its disappearance, however, has coloured the way we identity ourselves with the things that we buy, from the television programmes we watch to the newspaper we read, from the messages we hear from our politicians to the way we go about finding a partner. Out of it has emerged a strange new universe in which everyone wants to be different and everything has its niche.
Since it is a book written in America, it cites the example of Woolworth, one of the large departmental stores which suffered from a lack of identity and found low quality and low price wasn’t enough. General Motors crashed as motorists failed to distinguish between cars in its range. Yet, HBO, Moleskine and specialist media like The Economist have all succeeded by building their authority over narrow areas of expertise and cultivating passionate audiences around them – and their profits have mushroomed as a result.
This book tries to show that now the arena has become much bigger for the big beasts or big business, with many competitors in the field and with the consumer having plenty to choose from. With the entry of new competitors, survival of the established agencies against the new entrants is becoming tough, making the survival “not of the fittest but of those with the best fit with their environment.” This means finding a clear niche but if you fail to do so, you risk ending up on the list of endangered species.
This book would specially interest big business houses and producers and exporters of consumer goods.
(Hachette India, www.hachette.co.uk)
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