Marketing Fundamentals
Key question
Who is this offer for, and how do we recognise these people?
‘Everyone’ is not a target audience. The clearer it is who an offer is intended for, the more precise the message, visual language and channel will be. A good target audience is small enough to imagine, and large enough to make the offer worthwhile.
Learning objective: You can segment a market, describe a persona based on real observations, and derive design decisions from it.
If you try to reach everyone, you touch no one.
2.1 / Segmenting
Three pairs of glasses to share a market.
Segmentation means dividing a market into groups with similar needs. There are various lenses through which to look at this, but a combination usually provides the most meaningful insights.
01
Demographic
Age, income, location, life stage. Easy to gather, but reveals little about motivations.
02
Behaviour
How, when, and how often someone uses something. Often the strongest indicator of need.
03
Need
What someone wants to achieve. Unites different people with the same motive.
Viewing things through the lens of user needs is particularly valuable for design: it reveals which emotions and arguments a message must convey.
Segment by motive, not just by age.
2.2 / Personas
A person instead of a statistic.
A persona is a fictional yet realistic person who represents a segment. They have a name, a daily routine, goals and challenges. This is how ‘Commuters 25–45’ becomes Lea, 34, who works shifts and doesn’t have time for a puncture in the morning.
A persona is only as good as its foundation. Brief conversations, in-store observations or survey data make it robust. Invented details without a basis, on the other hand, lead to designing for a phantom.
A persona without observation is fiction.
2.3 / Jobs to be done
What is the offer 'used' for?
The 'Jobs to be done' framework asks what task someone is looking to accomplish with a product or service. The format is: "When I …, I want to …, so that I can …". For example: "When I set off in the morning, I want to not have to worry about my bike, so that I arrive relaxed."
Jobs are more stable than personas because they are not tied to an age or a profession. For designers, they serve as a good litmus test: Does this image, this headline, help get the job done?
People buy progress, not products.
Exercise
Developing a persona
Task: Develop a persona for an offer from your environment.
STEP 1
Choose a segment and write down three assumptions about it.
STEP 2
Conduct three short conversations with people from this segment.
STEP 3
Create a persona using the tool and mark what is verified.
STEP 4
Derive two design decisions, e.g. imagery and tone of voice.
Evaluation: Which assumption proved to be wrong, and what effect would that have had on the design?