Step 3: Who are your prototypical customers?

Ready! Fire! Aim!

One of the Holy Grails of marketing is the notion of specific market segments, a.k.a. the "Target" or "Right Audience." Traditionally, the advertising, marketing and media industries have defined audiences or markets in terms of demographics: presumably objective criteria that include age, gender, race or ethnicity, marital status, education, income, geographic location and so on. That is why all media outlets are designed to reach specific audience types, defined demographically. The Socratic Duck argues that demographic profiles of people (particularly those of age and gender) are of limited value, because they presume one 35 year old male is essentially the same as another. These profiles also necessarily presume the buying motivations, even the needs and wants of any person in the demographically defined profile, are the same. Common sense says this is utter nonsense. With six billion people in the world there are simply too many possible variations of psychological make-up (particularly with respect to wants and needs and how to fill them) to construct a definitive "target demo" of any real value.

So...who'd you wanna talk to?

Targets and audiences are also defined in "psychographic" terms: want and need, lifestyle, purchase preferences, buying motivations and so on. Defining target markets in psychographic terms makes a little more sense, since it goes more to the whys and wherefores of people's reasons for making purchases. As it happens, there is more commonality among people who are in the audience of a given media outlet in a psychological sense than there is in a strict demographic sense. It's basically a case of birds of a [psychological] feather flocking together.

Well, here's your problem, Vern...

You necessarily, then, define your target prospects (and therefore your marketing communication) in terms of what the problem is, or perhaps more accurately, the suite of problems your prospects have, what kinds of questions are they likely to ask and how and in what order are they likely to ask them. Most likely, you'll be able to identify several customer archetypes around whom you can craft complete buying-selling systems -- a system for each one. Moreover, in this step, part of the definition of these archetypes includes estimates on what each one is worth to your business financially. Then you can decide how much in the way of resources you want to spend to acquire customers in these archetypes, or even whether they're worth pursuing at all.