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How do I define my target customer when my customer base is so diverse?

Transcript

How do I define my target customer when my customer base is so diverse?

First, I’m going to tease apart these two terms. Your customer base is everybody that you serve or that you could be serving. Your target customer is that person who you bring disproportionate value to and who brings disproportionate value back to you.

It’s like that bullseye at the center of the dartboard. Aiming for the bullseye helps you in two ways. If you hit the bullseye, you achieve disproportionate value compared to the rest of the dartboard. Additionally, you’re more likely to get your dart on the dartboard at all.

Now that we’ve teased those two terms apart, if you’re still saying, “Yeah, but my target customer is so diverse,” look deeper. It rarely is a superficial demographic common denominator among your target customers. It usually is something more nuanced. It could be a behavior that they all share. It could be an attitude. It could be a value. It could be a life state. But it’s worth it because it makes the rest of your brand strategy that much more potent and motivating.

One example of a business that has a very large customer base and a very diverse customer base that still found its bullseye, its target customer, is Walmart. Walmart serves a hundred million Americans every week. That is a very large customer base, a very diverse dartboard. By peeling back the layers and looking at nuances, they were able to identify their target customer. It’s a very specific attitudinal and behavioral profile. By zeroing in on that, Walmart is able to optimize everything about their store experience and their marketing and their product assortment for this type of customer. It makes everything they do that much more powerful, that much more focused.

If Walmart can zero in on a target customer, you can do that too for your business. And I really encourage you to do it because it will make everything else you do that much more meaningful, that much more hardworking, and that much more powerful.

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