I remember going to a business development meeting where some sage person opined that 'You need to find a niche small enough so that you can expand to fill it, but not so small that there is no business in it.' A niche, for the uninitiated, is a small space, sometimes cave-like, sometimes occupied by a religious icon, also any small cavity-like physical space or specialised subject area or concept. I wonder if we might usefully think of the building materials industry as a series of niches? Let me explain.
Wallboard - sometimes called gypsumboard, or gypsum wallboard - has found itself a magnificently well-appointed niche, with enough space for many manufacturers to make a living. The product itself started out as a more-or-less unspecialised product for the covering of interior walls in situations where specialised characteristics were not required. Plenty of these 'commodity boards' are still produced around the world, at the 'easier' end of the spectrum of boards to make.
Wily and business-savvy producers, however, have periodically innovated to invade other niches (and to avoid being so dependent on the wafer-thin margins and vagaries of the market for the perennially over-supplied commodity boards). Commodity board has morphed into moisture-resistant board, specialised fire-resistant board, acoustic-attenuation board, impact-resistant board, air-quality improvement board, flexible boards, sag-resistant boards, condensation-management boards and now light or even ultra-light versions of practically all of these different types of boards.
Not only can you source boards with each of these characteristics, but you can also buy boards with combinations of these characteristics. For example, USG lists more than 30 different types of boards and panels on its web site.1 The permutations are almost endless (it's worth remembering that the total number of possible different moves in a game of chess is higher than the total number of atoms in the universe2). Each of these specialised boards has its own niche - and some of the more specialised niches are quite small. The question must be, for marketers and for producers, which niches are too small to try to fill - which niches are too small to try to make a viable business in?
Now, add in the possibility that wallboard might be required to exhibit all these specialised characteristics as well as some form of insulation performance as well and the niches and micro-niches will make the mind boggle. At the recent Global Gypsum Conference in Toronto I had the good fortune to handle a piece of wallboard that incorporated aerogel3 - a synthetic porous ultra-lightweight material with record-breaking insulation properties. Whether aerogel is ultimately incorporated into wallboard as millimeter-sized granules or as nanometer-sized powder, the possibility of a further multiplication of board types (and entry into further micro-niches) is obvious.
At AlitInform's MixBuild conference in Moscow at the end of November, I saw a number of presentations that might signal even weirder board recipes, perhaps incorporating calcium sulphate cements or metakaolin mixes. At the upcoming 1st Global Boards Conference4 in London (30 - 31 January), we will showcase cement-based boards: Everything from near 'pure' cement boards to wood-based boards with exotic mixtures of cement, gypsum and a plethora of additives.5 As previously reported in this magazine6, boards may yet come with sprayed-on solar panels, or with continuously variable insulation values (that could be automatically or remotely controlled according to environmental factors like solar gain, temperature or wind speeds). It seems that there are nearly as many different types of board as there are possible applications.
From our involvement in the insulation industry, we can also see that there is innovation pressure there as well, with the main insulation types (mineral wools, organic-based systems) progressively adding not only specialised characteristics (fire-resistance, air quality improvement, lower density) but also new physical forms. When insulation that has previously only or mainly been available as stiff boards becomes available as flexible blankets, or vice-versa, or which has been produced as granules but becomes available as boards or blankets (or as components in board systems), then the niches that we have previously been sure of as being large enough for a viable business to exist in suddenly seem a little smaller - or at least more crowded.
1 http://www.usg.com/content/usgcom/en/products-solutions/products/interior-panels/panels-&-drywall.html
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_number
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerogel
4 http://www.GlobalBoards.com
5 http://www.globalcement.com/magazine/articles/825-cement-boards-101
6 Global Insulation Conference 2013 Reviewed, Global Gypsum Magazine November 2013, pp34 - 39.
