#WhatTheInternetWants: Specialization

Winning in marketing today means playing according to the rules and implications of the technology that has transformed the world. 

“The ‘long tail’ of niches and personal customization is a characteristic not merely of media but of technological evolution itself… We can forecast the future of almost any invention working today by imagining it evolving into dozens of narrow uses. Technology is born in generality and grows to specificity.” - Kevin Kelly

The Internet has no middle. While it boasts some nodes/hubs with scale, the bulk of the Internet is niches. Edges. Specialized spaces and activity. Weird stuff. Dumb stuff. Scary stuff. Lots of mediocre stuff. Good stuff. Great stuff. And sometimes: absolutely amazing stuff.

The Internet likes edges because that’s where explosive, game-changing growth comes from. It encourages focused, pioneering fringe players to do groundbreaking things that rest of us adopt later – or rather, sooner than later thanks to the Internet.

The marketing lesson: find, engage and add value at the edges of your relevance.

A hybrid, multi-disciplinary creative/brand strategist with skills developed across the entire marketing ecosystem, Todd Lowe does everything from brand, connections, campaign and content strategy to communications/content ideas and marketing innovation.

As he decodes the marketing lessons from #WhatTheInternetWants, offline he unpacks the underlying strategic implications and applies them to building solutions on behalf of brands, agencies and consultancies.

View all #WhatTheInternetWants posts.

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Background/sources:

“[E]dges take many forms. They describe and define the edge of a company, the edge of markets or industries, geographic edges like emerging economies, demographic edges (either new generations or older generations) or the edges of specific domains of knowledge. Why the edge matters:?

• Edges tend to attract risk-takers… [because] there’s less inertia on the edge.
• Relationships form quickly on the edge
• Edges are powerful sources of business innovation because they are places of potential and friction, where traditional products and practices are no longer adequate to address unmet needs or unexploited potential." - John Hagel

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” - William Gibson