me write. you read.

The Discipline of Targeting

This topic has been rolling around in my noggin for quite some time, and after watching last night’s episode of Mad Men (3:2), I decided it was time to go ahead and put pencil to paper. Or keyboard to blog. Whichever suits your fancy. So here’s the crux of it: good consumer targeting takes remarkable discipline from both the agency and the client. Allow me to explain.

As marketing professionals we should always be able to watch a spot on TV and immediately decipher the target audience. Beer spots: men. Lifetime promos: women. It should be that easy, but it’s not. Why? Ineffective and inefficient targeting. I was watching TV the other night and a spot for a certain brand of yogurt comes on. The main character is an attractive young woman shopping at a grocery store. Shes very flirty with the camera, the setup is way over the top and the ending is downright odd. To my maleness, there was sexuality in play from the character. My wife, who is a retired account director herself, totally missed it. She just thought it was weird to end a spot like that. But to the trained male eye, there was far too much “naughtiness” in the spot for it to be accidental. From my point of view, the spot came off as if it was the result of dude-think: a bunch of guys sitting around concepting and ending up on something that appealed more to them than it does the target audience. OR, it could be that the client was a dude and chose something that skewed more to his liking than the target audience.

In recent years, I’ve noticed too many brands suffer from something very similar that I like to call “Cocktail Party Syndrome.” This popular condition is when marketers try to make a brand more palatable for their cocktail party friends than to be true to the brand’s actual and potential target audience. It’s hard for an egotistical creative director, account director or even CMO to look their swanky friends in the eye and proudly say, “We just cut new price/items shells for Brand X, and I think it’s really going to shake things up in the lower-income rural markets of the Great Plains.” That’s not cool. What’s cool is to say, “We’re totally reinventing our target audience. We want the brand to be the Target of our industry. We’re shifting from a lower-income based consumer to a middle and upper income individual. They have more disposable income anyway, right?” That sounds awesome to your peers because you sound like a trailblazer. But it takes a disciplined, strategic mind to have the gumption to know your target audience and stay focused on the business at hand. Despite how much fun it would potentially be to take it there, not every brand will be Target or Apple or VW or Chipotle or even Burger King. The solutions that have transformed good brands into great brands arent prescriptive because brand maintenance is not as simple as one solution fits all.

I look at Wal-Mart and Olive Garden as excellent examples of knowing your audience and speaking to them. Wal-Mart had a few missteps over the last few years, but they totally have it down now. Olive Garden, while not appealing to me, appeals to their audience and has the consistent growth to prove it.

I re-reference Mad Men again. The model of “Men want her and women want to be her” is completely false, and we have absolutely grown past this as an industry. However, it takes incredible discipline for individuals in advertising to not fall into this mindset when your target audience is not yourself. Its ok to create work that doesnt appeal to you. Its all about being objective versus subjective. And thats an entirely different post altogether.

Anybody else think an agency B-team did the latest round here?

In advertising, nothing may be harder than keeping a long-running, high-frequency campaign fresh. I give the Martin Agency huge credit for keeping the cavemen campaign at least interesting, if not odd, for it’s long run, and especially at the ridiculous TRPs they run that campaign at. But, the Progressive “Flo” campaign, well, to me it seems like they pulled their A-Team off of it (and no not Face, Murdock, Hannibal and BA) and put in their second stringers. Why? The first two or three rounds of ideas had a clear beginning, middle and end and did a good job selling the product. But the last few executions have fallen way short. They talk about the product, but the endings have been almost as awkward as a Will Ferrell/Molly Shannon sketch. The fist explosions. The awkward exchanged with the biker dude. The weirdness of introducing classic literary figure of Captain Ahab into an otherwise surreal, everyman environment. In any case, I always wonder if consumers notice it when the creative quality of a campaign wanes.