Definition: A specific group of consumers at which a company aims its products
and services
Your target customers are those who are most likely to buy from
you. Resist the temptation to be too general in the hopes of
getting a larger slice of the market. That's like firing 10 bullets
in random directions instead of aiming just one dead center of the
mark--expensive and dangerous.
Try to describe them with as much detail as you can, based on
your knowledge of your product or service. Rope family and friends
into visualization exercises ("Describe the typical person who'll
hire me to paint the kitchen floor to look like marble...") to get
different perspectives-the more, the better.
Here are some questions to get you started:
- Are your target customers male or female?
- How old are they?
- Where do they live? Is geography a limiting factor for any
reason?
- What do they do for a living?
- How much money do they make? This is most significant if you're
selling relatively expensive or luxury items. Most people can
afford a carob bar. You can't say the same of custom murals.
- What other aspects of their lives matter? If you're launching a
roof-tiling service, your target customers probably own their
homes.
Once upon a time, business owners thought it was enough to
market their products or services to "18- to 49-year olds." Those
days are a thing of the past. Because the consumer marketplace has
become so differentiated, it's a misconception to talk about the
marketplace in any kind of general way anymore. Now, you have to
decide whether to market to socioeconomic status or to gender or to
region or to lifestyle or to technological sophistication. There's
no end to the number of different ways you can slice the pie.
Further complicating matters, age no longer means what it used
to. Fifty-year-old baby boomers prefer rock 'n' roll to Geritol;
30-year-olds may still be living with their parents. People now
repeat stages and recycle their lives. You can have two men who are
64 years old, and one is retired and driving around in a Winnebago,
and the other is just remarried with a toddler in his house.
Generational marketing, which defines consumers not just by age,
but also by social, economic, demographic and psychological
factors, has been used since the early 80s to give a more accurate
picture of the target consumer.
A newer twist is cohort marketing, which studies groups of
people who underwent the same experiences during their formative
years. This leads them to form a bond and behave differently from
people in different cohorts, even when they're similar in age. For
instance, people who were young adults in the 50s behave
differently from people who came of age during the tumultuous 60s,
even though they're close in age.
To get an even narrower reading, some entrepreneurs combine
cohort or generational marketing with life stages, or what people
are doing at a certain time in life (getting married, having
children, retiring) and physiographics, or physical conditions
related to age (nearsightedness, arthritis, menopause).
Today's consumers are more marketing-savvy than ever before and
don't like to be "lumped" with others--so be sure you understand
your target market. While pinpointing your market so narrowly takes
a little extra effort, entrepreneurs who aim at a small target are
far more likely to make a direct hit.