Targeting your customers

Targeting is the process of narrowing down your audience to a selected group. You’re looking for the largest group of customers that are most willing to consider buying your product or service based on your marketing appeal. Let’s do an example using men’s leather wallets. Now, we know that customers in general prefer wallets that are slim, and we know that customers perceive our wallets as slimmer than the competition’s. So that becomes our key to targeting. Find a large group of customers wanting that benefit. Our current loyal customers are already big believers in our thin message. So we ask ourself, is there an opportunity to get more business out of them? Well, perhaps a passport case, or perhaps we could encourage them to buy one as a gift. I could target customers who are using a competitor’s wallet and who may be ready to replace their wallet. So in this case, I’m after men with overstuffed, thick wallets. (chuckles) Hey, there’s a lot of them out there. These guys are the most likely to appreciate the benefit of slimming down. Now the strategy is starting to take shape. I think of marketing as a set of dials on a control board, and I could turn those dials to get the right mixture of size of market and probability of conversion. Turning these dials to tweak our model gives a strategy that defines how we are going to compete and who we’re going to compete for. We have one final step. We have to define what we are going to say to the market to convince them, and that step is called Positioning.