You know, my brother is left handed. – Holly
In the first of 10 episodes, let’s talk about common marketing questions!
This month I am plugging the St. Louis chapter of the AMA. To become a member, you can visit https://amasaintlouis.org/.
SOURCES
Adapted from this list: https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/basic-marketing-questions
https://business.sparklight.com/the-wire/leadership/management/military-analogies-business-management
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
So we’ve been doing The Marketing Gateway for a few months now, and as I’ve talked to people about what sorts of topics they’d like for us to cover, one thing that’s become glaringly obvious is that we marketers have a really hard time with something you’d think would be pretty basic:
We don’t have a common understanding of what marketing really is.
I’m not faulting anyone for this. At the college where I teach, we have two different marketing programs – one in the College of Communications and one in the School of Business. I came up through the business school myself, and my training was all about marketing from a managerial perspective – strategy, tactics, systems, information, research, case studies and so forth. I learned how to write a communication brief and how to construct a great IMC plan and how to balance my marketing mix.
But when I’d talk to students in the other program, they weren’t learning those skills. They were learning the creative side of the field – creating effective advertisements, coming up with good taglines and positioning statements and learning how to think about branding. And honestly, I was a little jealous at the time because I wanted to do the fun, creative stuff too instead of having to take classes where I learned about other fundamental business skills like HR and accounting, but there was no time in my schedule to learn the fun stuff, and it wasn’t needed for my major anyways. People in my degree program went on to run corporate marketing teams; people in the other degree program went on to work for agencies.
In the professional world, I find that the divide is even steeper than that, though. A lot of the folks I know who work in marketing fell into the field through another path. Maybe it was sales. Maybe it was PR or mass communication. Maybe it was something related to the social sciences. Or maybe something really unrelated like healthcare or engineering or even creative writing. Somehow, they found a way into this field, and part of the reason we struggle to have a common language is because they learned by doing and they have their own ways of thinking about things.
So, I found this article on Indeed with the top 10 questions people have about marketing and I’ve decided that to help us all have a common understanding of what marketing actually is, we’re going to take a break from guests for a few weeks and round out our first 100 episodes of The Marketing Gateway with some marketing fundamentals.
And today, we’re going to start with the first question a lot of marketers really want to know: Who is my target market?
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Marketing has a lot of military terminology baked into it, and that’s not by accident – if you study the history of product marketing, you’ll find that a lot of the people who shaped the way we began to think about marketing in the 1940s, 50s and 60s had a military background from fighting in World War II, Korea or Vietnam and the common terms that they used to think about strategy derived from their military training.
So words or phrases like “campaign” and “bullet points” and “strategic alliance” and “marketing blitz” and “price war” and “target market” all came from this common understanding they all shared of sales and marketing being similar to military operations. After all, winning in the marketplace really just applying resources and tactics and personnel to capture market share, right?
And… well, not really at all, actually, because many products and brands can coexist without having to go to war with each other to succeed. But we’ll step away from this problematic analogy for now and examine the phrase “Target Market” as if it’s not about some sort of misguided military metaphor and instead a perfectly reasonable summary of the broader idea of “people who I think will really want to buy what I’m selling.”
Because that’s all a target market is. We marketers have a product or service to offer, and the target market is the specific group of people who might want to purchase it. And while some products or services aren’t targeted at all beyond a broad region like North America because they’re made for the mass market, most have some sort of feature, function or philosophy that narrows them down to a specific group of people.
Let me use the example of scissors, because they’re about as mass market of a product as you can possibly have. The purpose of scissors is to cut things – paper, plastic, string, cardboard, or anything else that needs to be cut. They’re safer to use than a knife because the blades are relatively dull and they’re also fairly easy to use without any special training because you use your fingers to open and close them and don’t have to worry about the blades slipping and injuring you.
But as broad of a product as scissors may be, there are certain types of scissors that are made for more specialized tasks:
- Safety scissors are made for small children for the obvious reason that they’re safer
- Kitchen scissors are made for people who prepare their own meals to help them cut up ingredients
- Crafting scissors are made for people who want specialized sheets for cutting crafting supplies, and they’ll often have multiple pairs with different functions
- Grooming scissors are made for dealing with loose skin or trimming nails
- Haircutting shears are used for cutting hair, and there are several different types of specialized scissors that allow for thinning out thick hair, styling hair more precisely or texturing
- Industrial scissors are used for cutting wire or metal
- Left-handed scissors are made for those who aren’t right hand dominant
- Surgical scissors are made for health care situations
- Sewing scissors are made for working with fabric and thread, and there are lots of different sizes and types of these as well
- Gardening scissors are used for pruning, weeding, lopping or trimming different sorts of foliage
I could go on, but it turns out that there are dozens of different types of specialized scissors, and you might even notice that the regular, plain old scissors made for the mass market still have one drawback – they’re made for right-handed people! And so there are even ambidextrous scissors for those who don’t want to discriminate or who are lucky enough to be able to use both hands interchangeably.
So, let’s talk about all of these scissors in terms of a target market. Roughly 10% of people are left-handed and 1% of people are ambidextrous, so if we wanted to market our specialized scissors to these individuals, we would not want to commit ourselves to speaking to a mass market audience when we know that 90 or 99% of the people who see our messaging or who encounter our products are going to be selected out because what we’re selling isn’t something they want or need. And because our message or product is not intended for the mass market, we’re also going to get crowded out by all the other products, services and messages that are vying for everyone’s attention.
So, how do we get our products in front of those lefties out there who need a special pair of scissors? That’s what target marketing is for! But today we’re just going to focus on how we identify that target market, because tomorrow’s episode is going to focus on how we reach them.
Now, you might say, “Sean, it’s not hard to identify them – just look at what hand they’re using!” But that’s not exactly true. First of all, not all left-handed people are going to need a pair of scissors. There are going to be some who’ve got all the scissors they’ll ever need for a lifetime sitting in a junk drawer somewhere in their home and there will also be some who just don’t want to own a pair of scissors. Maybe they don’t need to cut anything or they’re afraid of having sharp objects around or they insist on using their pocketknife for everything. Whatever the case may be, our population of “left-handed people” doesn’t cleanly map to our population of “people who would buy left-handed scissors.”
And then there’s something else we’re not thinking about, and that’s whether the customers are going to be individual people at all. Scissors are commonly sold to institutional buyers like schools, corporate offices, hospitals, colleges and other large organizations. They’re also generally not sold directly by the manufacturer to the end user; there’s typically at least one or two distributors or retailers involved in the selling process.
So as marketers, we need to think very carefully about who the target market is in potentially several different contexts. We might have a target market we’re trying to capture with packaging in a retail setting that’s different from who we’re trying to capture with bulk sales. We need to define the end user to help our channel partners to know how to position and sell our products, but we also need to define the actual customer who’s buying the scissors from us to help our sales team and marketing department know who to position the products towards.
Let’s say we’re thinking about the left-handed consumer for a moment because we’re trying to shape our packaging, distribution and messaging towards that consumer who’s going to buy our product at retail. We don’t want to just assume that left-handed customers are going to seek our products out; they’re living in a right-handed person’s world and they’re used to having to make things work! So we’re going to want to look for a particular type of left-handed person who’s self-assured enough to demand a left-handed product or, at the very least, to be willing to consider one if it’s on the shelf.
We don’t want to guess at this. We actually need to bother to do some research here, whether it’s formal marketing research like I do for a living or if it’s informal research where we go and talk to a bunch of lefties over lunch to learn about the triggers that cause them to consider buying a new pair of scissors.
For the sake of argument, and this is entirely fabricated, let’s say our research suggests that the most common time to purchase a pair of left-handed scissors is when a household has a child in the home, because left-handed scissors are often needed for left-handed children or parents who are cutting and pasting for school assignments. Kids are also always losing things or breaking them, and thus this seems to be a very natural and intuitive time of life in which people would need to buy new scissors.
So, we identify our target market not as left-handed people, but as households with at least one left-handed person and also at least one child who is under the age of 18.
This is, by the way, less than 10% of the total population. It’s actually closer to 4-5% of the population if we’re just assuming someone in the household is left-handed and that there’s also a kid at home. But we might also need to ask – are there are other criteria that might help us further define this target market?
Well, we find in our research that large households tend not to buy as many scissors. They share because every individual doesn’t need to own a pair of scissors. So if we look at household size, once we get above 2 children, sales drop off.
We might also find that income has an impact on buying scissors. Let’s say our research shows that low-income families under $50,000 a year usually don’t bother buying specialized scissors – they just get whatever’s on sale and make do with it. And high-income families where the household is making $250,000 or more don’t buy scissors at all, because their kids go to fancy private schools where everything is already provided. So we find that there’s a sweet spot for middle-class families with an income of between $50,000 – $250,000.
So we can further refine our target market to be families in that income range who have 1-2 children under the age of 18 living at home. That’s a much more precise group of people, but you know what? They’re probably going to make up at least 80% of our sales, and so we’re going to maximize our chances of success with them if we can identify them and then, as we’ll discuss tomorrow, find a way to reach them.
But let’s go back to our institutional buyers for a minute. What if we’re not so concerned about the end-users, because we don’t really interact with them, but we are definitely worried about getting large organizations to buy our products for the 10% of their workforce or student population who are left-handed? Our target market is going to have to be defined along those lines. We’re suddenly not thinking about consumers – we’re now thinking about purchasing agents who buy from manufacturers and distributors.
So first of all, they’re not going to expect retail-style packaging and quantities. They’re going to expect value from buying in bulk. So we may think of these customers in terms of their quantity needs. Let’s say our research shows that they tend to buy in packages that are divisible by 10 because that’s a decent number of scissors and it also allows them to just hand a box off to each supply room so they have 10 pairs available at a time.
Next, let’s say that they have a really hard time keeping track of how many left-handed scissors they have on hand, and so they need a quick visual cue to be able to know if they need to include another box in their next order. They also get annoyed when they can’t tell if they’re running low on right-handed scissors. We may have to adjust the product to make it look different from other scissors so it’s clear they’re for lefties – maybe we pick a really distinctive color, like teal or peach or mocha, and make them stand out.
Our research also shows that 78% of our purchases come from what can broadly be defined as educational and therapeutic facilities – not necessarily just schools and colleges, but also places that specialize in arts and crafts, adult daycare, camps and art therapy.
Finally, let’s also say that these scissors need to meet certain safety standards and material guidelines to be useable in these environments. We need to communicate how our scissors meet those standards and ensure that we are focused staying current in that area or else we’ll risk a situation where our target market may not be able to purchase our products even if they’d like to.
So our target market would then be defined as institutional buyers primarily in education or therapy centers who bulk order in units of 10 and who follow the proscribed safety standards. Again, this helps us winnow down from “business to business” to “we serve this defined target market.” And we can channel our messaging, advertising, distribution and sales apparatus into these target markets we’ve defined.
But does that mean we can’t have a secondary or tertiary market we also serve? Of course not! If you think of a dartboard, the primary target market might be our bullseye, the secondary market might be our inner ring and the tertiary market might be our outer ring. We are generally aiming for the bullseye, but if we strike elsewhere and it scores us some points, that’s great too. But we’re still going to focus on that bullseye most of the time.
I hope this has helped to at least get your mind going about who your own target market is. And in our next episode, we’ll talk about how to reach that target market through the power of marketing!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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