Competing With the Big Boys in a Niche Market

It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. Mass market retailers are always eager to make a sale, and they'll stock just about anything that is selling well. Even if it happens to have a religious nature.

To wit: Wal-Mart, Target, Best Buy, and others have noticed the immense size of the Christian music market. These big box category killers have added an ever increasing number of Christian titles to their CD selections. In 2005, mainstream outlets accounted for 61% of all Christian CDs sold (roughly 24 million out of 39 million units).

This leaves the Christian booksellers with a dwindling share in a market niche they once could claim all their own.

So what's an industry to do? Marketing Strategy, enter Stage Right.

Christian bookstores, especially the larger corporate chains like Family Christian and Lifeway, have, to their credit, built some solid defenses. Much-anticipated new releases are hyped with pre-buying promotions, in which customers can pay now for a new album, and receive a special low price and/or a gift item (t-shirt, bonus disc, etc.).

A good example of this is the upcoming release of Chris Tomlin's See The Morning CD on 26th September. Both Lifeway and Family Christian are running big pre-buy programs. And Tomlin has obliged them by having his new website up and running weeks ahead of the album release, while his record label has released a couple of tracks to Christian radio to "tease" listeners and build lots of hype. Finally, a special "digital EP" collection is being made available at iTunes to further tantalize listeners.

For those of you not familiar with Tomlin, he is one of the best-known Christian singer-songwriters of the day. Worship leader at Austin's Stone Community Church, Tomlin has written and recorded a growing list of praise songs that have become anthems of the post-modern 21C church.

Christian booksellers face the added competitive threat that mass market stores are open round the clock in some cases, and in the case of Wal-Mart, have a core customer group that is decidedly conservative Christian. Family Christian has countered by opening its stores for five hours on Sunday afternoons, a move that was met with resistance in some church groups. But if your market is being taken away by mainstream outlets, you have to fight back somehow.

I give credit to these niche marketers for devising ways to counter the big boys. Having a pre-buy does several things:

--Stores make the sale in advance, and get the money now.
--Any promo items can help make the sale, and generate increased traffic to the store.
--And when the album is finally released, it means yet another trip to the store, resulting in more traffic.

Given that "increasing store traffic" is the first order of business for retailers (hype insertion::You'll learn this in my MKT4344/5344 course next spring, which is planned to be in an entirely new teaching format::end hype here), the pre-buy plan is simply good marketing.

And I always feel good when the little guy can stand up to the big boys.

Dr "Anyone Want to Pre-Buy Tuition For My Course?" Gerlich