Niche strategy: merging economic and marketing theories with population ecology arguments

Abstract

Though niche strategy is an acknowledged way of realizing better profits from the firm's resources and actions, its long-term viability is by no means ensured; the demand in the niche may diminish or even disappear, or the niche market may become attractive to broad-line firms and new entrants. In parallel to the attention niche strategy has received from economists and marketing researchers, the subject of the emergence and disappearance of niches has also become of interest to scholars in the areas of ‘population ecology’, ‘niche width and the dynamics of organizational populations’ and ‘the demography of corporations and industries’, who base their arguments on long time series studies. Disregarding the strategic, economic and cost–benefit aspects, they attribute the birth and death of niche firms to the concentration of the firms in the market. I argue that the economists and population ecologists differ in their approach to niche strategy not only with regard to the type of forces acting on the niche firm but also on their time horizons, and propose a way to combine the benefits of the two theories.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 40 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.