Different campaigns have different targets
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Written by Atila on October 25, 2008 – 2:37 am
Ethical pharmaceuticals, machine tools, agricultural fertilisers, swimwear, Heineken lager and the local bingo hall all have different, varying and specific target audiences. What is common is the need to make audience selection precise.
That is the vital aspect of communications planning: the concept of precision. The more precise the targeting, the more effective the message will be, and the less wasteful the campaign.
Planning aims to become more and more precise: not all people but these people, not all house-owners but a type of house-owner, not all holiday-makers but a type of holiday-maker, not all motorists but a type of motorist. Few products sell to universal audiences and are all things to all people. Most products have their own profile, their own particular type of customer, their own segment of the market, their own special character. Indeed, the trend in marketing over the past decade has been to encourage this: to divide markets up and produce highly specific entries for specific segments. The trend, in short, has been towards ‘niche marketing’.
You do not sell to everyone, but to your particular market. Separate it out. Consider the motorcar market again. It actually is at one and the same time a wide variety of dissimilar subsections: Rolls-Royce, Minis, estate cars, Land Rovers, sports cars, middlesized cars for salespeople, two-seater cars and eight-seater ‘People Movers’. Not a market, but markets.
To make matters worse, markets change and move. Types of customer will alter over time. Holidays in Florida were rare, they then became up-market, but more frequent, and have now become mass-market. Targets change. Advertisers must keep ahead of such change.
So, who indeed is the target? This will depend on whether the situation is commercial or non-commercial. In a commercial campaign, in order to achieve a sale the advertiser will have to consider three forces which may lead towards the sale:
1. Who uses the product?
2. Who actually purchases it?
3. Who decides to obtain it?
These are the classic three partners in the buying process: users, purchasers and decision makers. But there may also be a fourth one – influencers! Taking the model of the office copier mentioned earlier:
- the secretary may use it
- the purchasing manager may issue the purchase order
- the Chief Executive or the senior directors may make the decision.
But around them may swarm nearly everyone in the organisation, all interested in, or with a view about, or making occasional use of, the office copying machines. They are influencers. They cannot help it.
Who are these users, purchasers and decision makers, in practice? That is, can they be identified, or specified? Or named? Central to the targeting decision is the question of defining the target audience. That is, defining:
- who it should be
- where and who they are.
