Creating Personas or Stereotyping? A Very Common Problem With Audience Development

When it’s time for our clients to develop a target audience, several different factors come into play.  Who does the client want to reach?  What is the ideal audience interested in?  How do they behave?  Why would they want this product?  And so on, and so on. 

But herein lies the problem - are you answering these questions based on data and facts, or are you stereotyping your audience?  There’s a fine line between knowing and assuming, which typically hints to a lack of data present in the audience analysis and development process. Here are a couple thought processes we see regularly when discussing audience development. 

We think this is who we should be reaching.

Subjective persona development.  You think you know your audience, so you make several assumptions when targeting age, gender, demographics, and income levels.  However, in today’s world where cultures are evolving rapidly, assumptions can easily be outdated and biased.  At the risk of sounding too extreme, developing subjective personas based on limited data inputs could be seen as a form of stereotyping, defined as “a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.”

We have no idea who our customers are or who they should be. 

If this thought is floating around your head, you’ll probably end up developing an audience that is too broad.  However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  By setting aside a small budget to test broader audiences, you’re allowing yourself the opportunity to learn something new.  With the data you collect, you’ll have the chance to see what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to building a target audience through fact based learning.

So, where do we go from here?  Is this something your team struggles with today, or do you have a different perspective on audience development? Stay tuned for our next blog on the five steps to building fact based audiences.