How to define a target audience

Marketing’s fundamental purpose can easily be forgotten in today’s marketing environments. This is because most marketers now operate tactically, which places the responsibility for marketing strategy in the hands of just a few senior marketers. 

In this detailed piece, we explain how to overcome the limitations associated with this setup, and in doing so, hope to inspire you to create activities that are more inventive and exciting. As a natural consequence, they will then deliver much greater return on investment.

We cover this in three parts. We start by establishing the state of marketing in Part One, before considering the marketing fundamentals in Part Two and how best to interpret them in Part Three.

If we strip back the layers, marketing exists to perform a single function. Marketers are responsible for finding the best way to make a product or service appeal to a target market. Naturally, this requires a holistic understanding of the target market in order to understand how best to engage them, with what and when.

However, this is rarely the case in today’s marketing environments. We’ve spiralled into a situation where, more often than not, the opposite happens; marketing budgets are allocated based on commercial and not market heuristics; marketers are selected for their outputs rather than the insights that led to them.

This result in a lack of knowledge of how the target market think and feel. This is because by collecting a person’s online behaviour, a marketer is expected to know what’s on the person’s mind and why they made any decision. Yet in the fast-paced world of online marketing, marketers rarely take a moment to step back and consider the limitations of doing so. Instead, they typically double down on what they can measure as being more important than what they can’t.

This is particularly relevant for the vast majority of businesses that have vastly inferior data sets than the likes of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. Furthermore, consumers have become concerned with the measures that companies use to track them, which has led to an increasing number of privacy features and a limit to the cookie data that can be collected.

Marketers in a difficult position

This leads marketers into a difficult position. They’ve spent over a decade increasingly equipping their teams in the hope that data would evolve to provide the perfect answers. Moreover, CEOs and CFOs have become used to marketing efforts being reduced to oversimplified data pathways. 

A prevailing belief that marketing is not an art and that data alone can be used to optimise marketing activities ad infinitum. This message is easy to sell because of its simplicity. However, the reality is that it’s just pure fallacy. 

This can be proven in two ways. The first is that data analysis is in of itself an art. The best data scientists are prized for their unique ability to interpret the data, e.g. by assessing different levels of significance or categorising outliers. If they weren’t then all marketers would become follow a unifying playbook for data analysis. 

Secondly, the majority of marketing remains an art because there isn’t a way to rationalise every aspect of perception using data. This is because perception will always sit within the eye of the beholder, and no amount of data will be able to decode its complexity. For this reason, sought after graphic designers don’t follow a rule book. Instead, they invent and use what exists for inspiration. It is this invention that creates curiosity in the person experiencing it.

The need for a different approach

To overcome the limitations of this current state of marketing, we need to take a different approach. An approach that considers people for all we are; irrational, complex and flawed. In doing so, we can investigate that value of ‘gut instinct’ on decision-making. We can also set the context for decision-making, realising that people simply don’t care about every decision they make. In doing so, marketers can then free themselves from the shackles of insufficient and inadequate data sets. 

To illustrate this, why not think about a product or service that you really like. Now think about whether you always choose to buy it. You may for example like drinking Coke but not always buy Coke. Now, try to pinpoint a time when you wavered between the two. You may find it difficult to rationalise your eventual choice.

However, for a typical marketer, this is not good enough. They need to attribute your decision based on the data at their disposal. For example, they may attribute your choice of Coke down to whether you’ve recently seen an advert or whether you like the influencer they’ve selected for a campaign.

In reality, the reasons for your decision are likely to be much more complex. For example, you haven’t had a Coke in a while, you're on the move, you’re in the car, and your friend selected a Coke first. Understanding the relative importance of each one of these decision-making factors is incredibly tough. It’s therefore human nature for marketers to over-emphasise the factors they can measure when the most important factor may be something they can’t. 

A better way to understand this process requires going back to basics by considering the marketing fundamentals as a driver for decision-making. This results in a distinct difference in marketing output because it moves a marketer’s objective back to finding the best way to appeal to a person as opposed to the behaviours they exhibit.

Building an emotional connection

Furthermore, this new approach can transform a brand from having a functional impact on the target audience to an emotional impact that feels perfectly suited to their needs. Apple, Nike, and Google can all credibly state their ability to have brands that generate a positive emotional impression on their customers.

By contrast, there is no unique differentiation in functional brands that presume customers are always predisposed to making rational decisions. For example, a new streaming service could name itself ‘StreamTime’ and subsequently state on its website that ‘We have the most streaming channels and more content than anyone else. More movies, TV shows and documentaries.’

This is how millions and millions of businesses start, however it contrasts with the approach of the world’s most famed industry leaders. For comparison, this misses the emotional value that the phrase ‘Netflix and chill’ had on its success, or the sticky nature of Netflix’s user interface.

This can be investigated further by considering brand name selection. Tesla is not a name that makes it easy to understand what the company does. It takes a little work to realise it’s named after an electricity pioneer. Alternatively, Pret A Manger is written in French, despite being more popular in English-speaking countries. This is because these brand names have a distinctiveness that creates a powerful emotional connection through time.

Even when presented with the logic, most marketers still follow a functional approach. This is because they feel uncomfortable in moving beyond it, particularly as it risks creating a negative emotional impression if not performed correctly. For example, McDonald’s in the UK often focus on life experiences within its advertising campaigns as opposed to the food itself. This could easily be seen as a risk if the teams and agencies involved weren’t familiar with the cultural intricacies of the brand’s UK customers.

Our behaviours result from the combined influence of genetics and conditioning. For the purposes of this piece, we’ve simplified them into 10 areas that influence the way we all experience the world.

Marketers can use them to inform every aspect of marketing strategy. A digital marketer can hone targeting parameters, a content marketer can use them to develop an engaging blog series, and a digital designer can use them to build an app UX and UI.

They don’t set prescribed rules for creativity, but instead provide the behavioural context from which to free up marketers to provide their uniquely creative touch. This ensures there is greater consistency across marketing activities, particularly when sizeable teams are involved.

1. Family

Family life shapes our journey throughout life; at school, at university, as a parent. 

2. Work

Work life shapes a working week, weekends, and society in general. It also performs an essential function in driving society forward.

3. Food (and drink)

Societies are structured differently based on their consumption of food or drink, with current trends further shaping their differences.

4. Information

A hunger for information in some form or another has powered the growth of social media, streaming services and online news outlets.

5. Exercise

We all require exercise at some level to exist, yet our lives have become more stationary, making it more and more of a challenge to stay fit.

6. Community

We all crave human interaction in some way. Whether online or offline, we all want to feel a part of something more than just ourselves.

7. Relaxation

We all have a desire to switch off from the stresses of daily life. And this often goes hand in hand with a desire to do so in private, and in a private space.

8. Enjoyment

This aspect of our lives typically possesses the most social currency, although what we find enjoyable varies significantly between people.

9. Maintenance

We all need to perform a wealth of tasks just to keep our lives ticking over. Though they take up considerable time, they typically lack social currency.

10. Shop

We all need to shop regularly to keep up with life’s demands by making purchases either online, offline, through subscriptions or direct debits.

This ability for brands to evoke emotion highlights the magic of marketing. It also inspires marketers who feel more closely connected to a brand’s mission by filling them with a sense of purpose.

Convincing senior executives is more challenging by comparison, which increases the importance of using data to bring them in on the journey. These marketing fundamentals can therefore be modelled using data gained from an extensive variety of primary and secondary data sources. Once modelled, the links between them can also be clearly defined to show how a change in one can have a significant impact on several others.

Furthermore, modelling them can help to contextualise how the pursuit of money impacts on people’s behaviour. And conversely, the benefits of work can be separated from monetary rewards. Careers provide an opportunity to benefit in many ways beyond simply making money.

A blueprint for success

In this detailed piece, we introduced the marketing fundamentals and explained how they can have a positive influence on marketers and the activities they create.

We leave you with the thought that many businesses, which succeed against all odds, do so because they understand the customers better than market leaders they compete against. This can be seen in our investigation of 100 famous brands.

Any questions?