An important part of any successful business is knowing which customers to appeal to. Not every product or service is going to be for every consumer. Naturally then brands develop images and a niche for themselves. Typically, the responsibility lies on the consumer to see and appreciate these niches.
At the same time, the business has to make the consumer feel special. It’s not enough to specialize around an idea or brand, each individual customer must be specialized to. This idea is hyper-specialization. It’s similar in a lot of ways to targeting, but takes it down to the most minute level.
Hyper-specialization is possible today because of all of the advanced metrics and statistics available. Engagement, time preferences, customer engagement, loyalty, all of these are vital metrics. For an example of hyper-specialization today just think of Spotify. Spotify creates individual playlists, it presents its homepage individually, and Spotify Wrapped is an occasion every year.
Spotify Wrapped is a great example of providing something individual to the consumer which can then be shared and enjoyed. It’s simply more interesting than a general summary of how everyone listened to Spotify throughout the year. The consumer needs to think they’re special, and the brand does this by specializing to them.
This is the power of hyper-specializing today. In a time where brands are competing for attention so aggressively, this makes people feel special. Why use McDonalds or Starbucks when their app is so much less specialized? Why use a random streaming service over Netflix when it always gives me the movies I like? These are the questions specialization creates.
Source: BrandGuard
