There is a little girl up the street named Riley and she is a princess. Not the pejorative version of a princess, but an actual princess. You can tell because she has worn the same Disney princess costume every single day since last Hallowe’en. Her exasperated mother periodically bribes her out of the now-tattered shiny blue dress and cape long enough to wash both princess and finery. She is, by the way, an expert on unicorns.
Personally, everything I know about unicorns comes from an Irish Rovers song and a Timothy Findley novel. That limited insight has served me pretty well to this point.
Then there’s this: Segmentation is Killing Your Brand: Five Reasons To Find Your Unicorn Customer.
It’s a post by the very smart brand marketer, Deb Gabor at Sol Marketing, of whom I am an avid fan, but this one needs a response.
Investors use the term unicorn to describe those exceptionally rare startups that blaze into being and succeed more or less out of the gate. In this sense, the unicorn metaphor sort of works since, as Riley asserts, “they’re totally real but only princesses can find them.” The princesses with lots of capital will tend to do rather well.
But please let’s not start spraying the idea of unicorns all over everything, especially brand strategies. In the first place, if your ideal customer is a mythical creature visible only to drunks and princesses, that is a pretty limited playing field and you will not last too long.
I think what Deb is trying to get at here is the importance of knowing your ideal customer: that person whose needs fit nicely with your offering, and whose problems are effortlessly solved in a way that serves them and makes you a fair margin.
The idea that you will want to sit around imagining your ideal customer’s perfume, favourite sports teams and toothpaste is right up there with imagining how much they resemble an imaginary white horse with a horn on its nose.
Personas are not a thing you make up over a few beers: they need to be rooted in actual data from actual people you consider to be your ideal customers. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic data to have, but it has to be data, not conjecture. Making stuff like this up is a sure sign that you are confusing your marketers with your market.
Which brings me to one last issue with this post, and that’s the idea that segmentation is bad and unicorns are good. Segmentation isn’t bad, and it isn’t killing anything. Indeed, knowing the ideal customer within a segment of your market is a pretty powerful part of a good go-to-market strategy. Again, segmentation needs to be based in evidence, not the opinions of six-year-old princesses and it needs to add value instead of being a distracting make-work project, but it’s probably more worthwhile than chasing unicorns. Segmentation models are not rocket science. I once used a lovely Chiati to create one that was borne out nicely in the data.
Besides, unless rainbows can be converted to bitcoins I’m pretty sure unicorns don’t have any money. I’ll check with Riley and get back to you.
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The Care and Feeding of Ideal Customers
Why Your Customers’ Expectations Are Ruining Your Relationships
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
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