Part of campaign development is defining your target audience. I’ve noticed that brands often get cold feet when it comes to targeting a very specific customer segment.

If we target [specific segment], will we limit ourselves to only this audience in the future?

It’s a natural concern, especially if you are responsible for bringing in sales. Wouldn’t you want to target everyone? But targeting everyone is a recipe for vanilla products and marketing that ends up exciting no one. On the contrary, focusing in on one specific audience group can expand your audience.

Focusing on one specific audience target expands your potential audience.

Take Yeti.
Yeti is a brand of outdoorsy goods including coolers, insulated drink ware, waterproof bags and apparel. Since its founding in 2006, the brand has grown to a 3 Billion+ market cap on $500M+ in revenue.
Yeti’s website. Source: Yeti
A WSJ article mentioned that even the Kardashians are fans after Kim Kardashian shared a photo of her Yeti cooler on Instagram Stories. Would Yeti take advantage of this? It could be huge media value to partner with someone like Kim. But Yeti chose not to act on it.

“It’s kind of weird for a marketing-brand person to say this…but a lot of my job is pulling the brand back, trying to ensure that we are true to ourselves without being a fad.”
— Yeti VP Marketing, Paulie Dery, WSJ

Why didn’t Yeti partner with the Kardashians? The Kardashians might have a large following, but they aren’t the audience target. Yeti is a brand for fishermen, hunters, and outdoorsy types. Fishermen are a discerning bunch — requiring high quality products that can survive travel, all-day activity, water logging, et cetera. To be associated with them doesn’t mean you are only limiting yourself to fishermen. It means you are setting the bar incredibly high. If fishermen approve, then I do as well. The Kardashians might have broad brand awareness… but they don’t offer strong associations for the quality of outdoors products.

The tip of the spear targeting strategy

Instead of going for the broadest audience, Yeti is following a tip of the spear strategy, designing for their most discerning customers. By focusing there, you actually widen your potential audience:
Focusing on the tip of the spear widens your audience by building trust. Focusing on the broadest audience leaves discerning customers behind. Source: Michelle Wiles
Harley Davidson is another tip of the spear brand. They market as a rugged adventure brand for living life on the edge and escaping the board room. And yet, in Harvard Business School professor Youngme Moon’s book Different, she mentions that the Harley Davidson brand probably has more customers who practice law than who rebel against it. But that’s fine. The white-collar customer that Harley Davidson serves isn’t buying a Harley to live out their life at the office. They have that life already. They are buying a Harley to buy a fantasy. They are buying the fantasy of the tip of the spear customer.
Source: Linkedin
Source: AdAge

Finding your tip of the spear customer

What makes a tip of the spear customer is that they are discerning. These are the people that will anchor your brand as the brand for [x].
Consider a big market: new parents. I have read many research reports that teach marketers about marketing to today’s ‘busy, on the go mom.’ She’s on the go in many decks that’s for sure. But the tip of the spear is the most discerning new parent. The most opinionated. The expecting parents who read every label on every product and who threw out anything that could be remotely dangerous to their future child. Design for them, and you’ll set the bar high enough to design for many. Design for the ‘typical’ expecting parent, and your resulting product will be typical as well.

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Looking to define your tip of the spear customer?

I run brand consultancy Embedded — where I partner with founders and C-suite executives to unlock brand growth.
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