Sunday, July 13, 2025

D2C Brand Playbook - Part 6 - Defining Target Audience - For a Niche or for Everyone?



Brand's Dharma?

To go deep & be meaningful to a niche 

OR 

To go wide & be just a solution for everyone?



Brands exist to enable charging a premium & hence delivering profits.

Not labels.

Labels exist to just exist. As a commodity. To be a me-too thus commanding no premium.

Of late, founders are talking about making profits. A sustainable unit economics.

Not growth at cost of profitability.

But profitability at cost of growth.

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Wanting to go deep.

To become a niche, to serve a smaller slice of a market, but differentiated.

Where consumers relate with you as you help them solve a pain, so effortlessly.

Because you chose to study it in greater detail, to devise a product, that ends their discovery!

Delivering a deeper experience with a meaningful story.

Over a period of time (with consistent efforts), more people start resonating with your story,

expanding volumes. Multiplying growth.

Brand becomes bigger and delivering higher profits.

-------
Vs wanting to go wide.

To offer to everyone.
To get more volumes.
To just grow, petering out long term benefits.

Becoming undifferentiated, to match the needs of everyone.

Becoming like a commodity with a label.
No deeper experience or story.

Just a label, an identifier.

In short term you win volumes.
Over longer term, you lose that growth vector.
More buyers find you as a solution, but meaningless.

Like bread, anyone could do.

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How to do it once figured the audience?

1. Identify the jobs to be done from functional, emotional, social perspectives for the cohort/s chosen.

2. Zero on one of the cohorts where the JTBD's are powerful & your product is doing that.

3. Define your Target audience persona at a deeper level - demographics, psychographics along with Behaviours (how do they use category, how they shop, who they ask, how they consume media) & Attitudes (who do they like/dislike, how do they feel about category)

4. Next step - Use the naunces in the Persona to define your brand positioning.

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