You started a gorgeous hair business, but demand lacks hopes for some time. It seems there is no growth and lately new hair stores opened their doors in your market. Your hair market is saturated. What can you do?
What is a saturated hair market?
If in a marketplace, a place where people buy and sell hair extensions and services, the available supply of goods falls short of buyer demand. Marketing experts will say this hair market is saturated. The reason can be:
- Too many participants or
- People turn their back to artificial hair integrations and go natural
- The demographics change, more elderly people, etc.
All this will limit your profitability and potential to grow. Should you accept this or not?
Examine the situation
Unless you earned plenty of money to retire, you do not have to take your hair market is saturated. Do not make decisions overnight, but take your time to first analyse the situation.
What is the real cause of the absence of demand?
Analyse the market, use google trends to understand what is still in demand and what not anymore. Let’s take Arizona for example. Learn from Google trends, where one can see the queries people key in the search bar.
Select first the geography, in our case Arizona and start with Hair Extensions as search term. This shows indeed a deteriorating trend. Indeed, the hair extensions market is saturated! But now you have to be original, look for other search terms of developments in the hair market people might start looking for.
Perhaps more people go natural, so relate with natural hair or similar terms. Or perhaps the demographic evolutions bring more elderly people with hair loss. Or people are more attracted to wigs. You have to play with this for some time and compare the several possibilities. See the first analysis of the hair market and see what the possible alternatives.
Take your time to analyse, and use several alternative search terms.
If you found a mounting search term, do not change your service offer just like that but analyse the rivalry, who is the competition, what is their service offering. Do a market survey to understand what customers in this market like and do not like about the current providers or salons.
This will show you new commercial opportunities in your saturated hair market, so define your ideal client and start selling again.
For ideas see my previous post about #BackToSchool, specific markets and the LGBT community for example.
