A friend of mine was researching some prosumer camera gear and said something about the process that made my ears prick up: it was impossible to search for.
The problem, it turned out, wasn’t a lack of information about this particular area.
It was the opposite – there was too much information… stats, numbers, standards, graphs, reviews.
My friend had such a specific application that he couldn’t reconcile all the volumes of information and conflicting advice relative to his particular situation.
What he started off looking for was information, but what he realised he needed was a person.
He needed to ask someone who had experience who could advise on all the subtleties of this niche of niche area (and would have paid a premium for the privilege).
Because SEO and PPC are now relatively in maturity, there is now ever increasing competition and a diminishing return to providing a quick answer to someone’s google search.
In this climate, the future is being handed to the Ungooglable – to the artists who have mastered niche of niches that are so complex that overwhelmed consumers simply have no choice but to come to you.
A failure of retail, or the inevitable result of the race to the cheapest price?
Some stores manage to be populated by experts who will then sell you a competitively priced item, but they’re increasingly rare.
Opportunities here for canny experts. I’ve long wanted someone to take a regular Joe like me clothes shopping; I don’t know if such a service exists.
Great question! Thanks for your thoughts @FONDU_MATT. I don’t think its necessarily a failure of retail, but perhaps more a sign of the exponential growth curve every industry is facing. Now that we all have access to the long tail of information, there really is no such thing as an expert in any niche. Moving forward, the best we can hope to be is an expert at a niche of niche (and even this is under threat). The challenge for retail then becomes making the counter-intuitive decision to forego the (apparent) larger local niche market, to focus on the ‘smaller’… Read more »
>Now that we all have access to the long tail of information, there really is no such thing as an expert in any niche.
ooooo, that’s a big call. I’m hoping we will always value the difference between being well read (aka knowledge) and knowing which parts of that input are crap (wisdom).
If I’m hearing you right, I think we’re making the same call here… the ‘expert’ will be the one we would most prefer to turn to to look for advice we can apply to our specific application. They will always exist. I was more referring to that the level of expertise we seek out (ie. where we would be prepared to pay a premium) is no more for generalist niche queries, but for ‘niche of niche’ specialist applications. The bar for all experts has been raised! 😮