While many marketers (online or offline) tend to look for a hole in the services or popular trends to find the business opportunities, there are some who had success by either creating products which seem to have no demand or pursuing extreme niche market.

Sakura Craypas’s high end ballpoint pens

Sakura is known for crayons and color pencils that are used by students from kindergarten and up. In order to update the image of the company’s products and the users, they created high end ballpoint pens ranging from 2200yen to 5000yen. The sleek design and the quality of these pens became popular among adult consumers despite the high price.

Yamazaki Kinzoku Kougyou’s Curry Rice Spoon

Japanese curry-rice is one of Japanese comfort foods. It’s typically eaten with a spoon. I don’t think anyone ever felt the needs for special spoon to eat the curry-rice, but an employee at the Yamazaki Kinzoku Kougyou had a different idea.

The spoon was a huge hit immediately after it was put on a market. They sold 10,000 spoons in just the first 3 months. This is quite remarkable considering that it costs 1250yen. It is designed to scoop and eat meat and vegetables in the curry easily. Suddenly, it became a must-have product.

In the search marketing industry, companies tend to go after “popular” keywords with tons of search volume. The thing is that those big words are not likely to help connecting the businesses with the audience who are likely to convert in near future. The bigger success would actually come from longer tail keywords that connect deeper with the target audience, and those content would have more impact to their purchase decision making.