Know Your Audience.
It’s a critical tenet of marketing and advertising. How can you sell your product or build brand loyalty if you don’t know who you’re talking to?
And while there’s a lot of truth to that, we’ve also seen the emphasis on defining a target audience backfire for marketers and advertisers. When you spend too much energy defining and narrowing your audience — particularly when it’s based on assumptions or biased data — you may be inadvertently limiting the number of customers you can reach.
Think about the whole athleisure market. Remember way back when yoga pants were for yogis and people doing aerobics? Today they are a staple in many people’s closets, whether those people work out regularly or not. The yoga pants consumer is far beyond what anyone might have imagined 15 years ago.
The point is: assumptions we make about our audience often end up limiting us, blinding us from opportunities to grow our market share. This is especially true when it comes to gender.
In marketing, it’s hard to separate conversations about the audience from gender. For most teams, gender is a starting place: “We’re targeting professional women in their 30s.” “Our primary audience is active men who live in cities and enjoy DIY projects.” “Our target segment is teenage girls who love Addison Rae.” If you’re in marketing or advertising, this practice likely feels familiar.
But what if you’re wrong? Maybe teenage girls who love Addison Rae will also love your product, but so could teens of other genders. And by telling your consumers who your product is for, rather than letting them decide for themselves, you may be squandering opportunity and leaving money on the table.
One of our favorite examples of a brand that got it right here is White Claw. An article in The Washington Post — “The key to White Claw’s surging popularity: Marketing to a post-gender world” — talks about how the hard seltzer brand broke free of the gendered marketing of wine and beer. According to White Claw’s Vice President of Marketing: “It wasn’t a world where guys got together in a basement and drank beer and women were off doing something else, drinking with their girlfriends. Whatever we put out creatively and how we positioned the brand really reflects that everyone hangs out together all the time.” And as a Bank of America analyst explained: “It’s aspirational, in ways that have nothing to do with gender.”
So, how can advertisers and marketers start thinking differently about audience targeting and gender? Here are a few key strategies to help guide the way.
- Ground yourself in the value proposition: What’s special about your product? What makes it unique? When and how would someone want to use it? Think outside the box here. By grounding yourself in those answers, you will actually start to develop a new framework for campaigns, one where the consumer can decide “this is a product I want to try” rather than you telling a consumer “this product is or isn’t for you.”
- Align the value proposition with potential audience characteristics: As you’re thinking about images and concepts for campaigns, it’s reasonable to start aligning the value proposition with key characteristics of consumers. For example, White Claw marketers probably zoomed in on individuals with an active social life, perhaps those who are health conscious.
- …But avoid using GENDER as a proxy for those characteristics: Too often, though, we see gender as a proxy for characteristics that connect to key attributes. For example, if we want to target people who do home construction projects, our brains may immediately go to “men” as a proxy for that characteristic. But gender is not a characteristic, and seeing it that way limits us from potential market share. Gaining a strong understanding of what gender is and isn’t, and how it’s changing, can help here.
- Always be willing to expand and pivot: You may never be able to anticipate who will love your brand or how they might use your product! Keeping an open mind, and imagining new possibilities for your audiences, will help ensure that you don’t miss out on potential new segments or campaign ideas. Looking at how consumers interact with your product or similar brands on social media can be a great place to start expanding your perspective.
As perceptions of gender continue to change and expand, marketing and advertisers need to catch up. This isn’t as simple as casting a Dad in a laundry detergent commercial, or creating a toolset branded for women. It requires us to fundamentally reimagine gender and question long-held assumptions about what gender is in the first place. Otherwise, we’ll continue to limit our businesses in ways we don’t even realize. By making these shifts and changing our framework, we can open up new worlds of possibility — and profit.