The Importance of Finding Niches

Power Rangers: A Case Study

Power Rangers (or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) is an internationally famous TV show, with roots in Japanese shows of a similar target audience. Haim Saban created the show, made it successful and eventually owned half of the entire Fox Kids network. Haim Saban describes his experiences on the podcast How I Built This by Guy Raz of NPR.

Niches can be goldmines of opportunity, but they are not always easy to spot. The first niche that Saban found was in music. Many composers tried to get gigs for well-known sitcoms and late-night TV, because they were well-known and having their name on the credits could lead to more work. However, Saban crunched the numbers and found that an artist could get more money if they did composing work for a cartoon, even one that wasn’t as well-known. 

Most publishing companies would pay based on the number of minutes that a piece of music was played on air, and a cartoon had constant music, so you could make a lot of money. Saban soon created 12 studios that made music exclusively for cartoons like Inspector Gadget and He-Man.

The next niche that Saban found would become the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. He was on a trip to Japan and saw a Japanese show that featured people in full-body Spandex suits and masks beating up monsters. Saban realized that because the actors’ bodies were obscured, he could buy fight scenes from someone who had already made them, film American kids in America for non-fight scenes, and then sell it as an entirely new show. In the 90s when Power Rangers came out, it was considered very risky even though similar shows had been airing in Japan for over 20 years. When Fox Kids put Power Rangers on early-morning time slots for 8 weeks, the ratings were double or triple every other show on the network, making Saban very wealthy.

Rupert Murdock, the owner of the Fox network, approached Saban about selling his production company and cartoons to the Fox network a year after the show started airing. Saban did not want to sell, but rather create a joint venture. As replicating Saban’s success with Fox’s resources would take over five years, Murdock agreed to Saban’s asking price and signed over half of the Fox Kids network for Saban’s distribution network and existing cartoons.

While Saban did have good luck in finding niches, most of his success is from managing the opportunity and planning what he wanted to do. If he had accepted Murdock’s first offer, then he would have given away everything he had built without getting much in return.