When starting a business we’re told to pick a target audience but seldom do we do so and try to appeal to everyone. Either because we don’t want to exclude somebody or that we don’t want to miss out on an opportunity. If we try to appeal to everyone, we’re appealing to no one person. We rather need to find the smallest viable target audience that creates the change we hope to make as a business. I was reading Seth Godin’s latest book ‘This Is Marketing’ over the weekend and he used this analogy to illustrate the necessity of focusing on a specific target audience. Seth talks about a product used for thief detection which comes in the form of a purple powder. If the tiniest amount hits your skin, the moisture on your body will dye your skin with an ultra violet stain that will take some serious effort to remove. 💧If you were to take one teaspoon of this powder and drop it into a swimming pool, the pool will turn purple forever. But if you were to drop the whole container into the ocean, the ocean will remain unchanged. Be it a niché offering, or unique tone of voice that appeals to a specific customer, the point here is that by creating a product/service/message for those who are more likely to need what we have to offer and listen to what we have to say, we have a greater chance of being successful in creating change for those we serve.
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