Kyle Thomas was our guest speaker this week. Kyle works as a content producer, during his speaking he explained that it was common for marketers to say that their target audience is “everyone” many people believe that their product appeals to everyone. However, this simply cannot be the case. It impossible to appeal to everyone. This leaves us as content producers with a bit of a situation. We are left to either poke and prod the brand for more details, or we can do our own research to understand who the brand audience is. Both options are not ideal as having a narrowed audience means that we can market our products more effectively. There are many considerations that we must account for, think back to when we covered brand archetypes. We discussed how many brands appeal to certain demographics based on character traits like adventure, social class, etc. Brands like Lululemon may try to appeal to everyone since almost anyone can live an athletic life but that doesn’t mean that everyone will buy their products. Some may buy generic gym clothes as they are more cost effective.
Targeting certain audiences will also help to mitigate errors in marketing. If we try to be too broad with our marketing campaigns, we may run into some issues where we end up offending people instead of appealing to them. They also may end up rubbing viewers the wrong way. An example of this would be the Folgers home for Christmas campaign that aired a few years ago.
This commercial features a soldier that comes home for Christmas to surprise his parents and sister. However, it ends up coming off a little uncomfortable as it feels as if the brother and sister are more than just siblings. Mistakes like this can be identified easier if you work with multiple people from different backgrounds with different views. But even then, unfortunately sometimes everyone misses things that will be picked up during the ad. This was the case for the Folgers commercial. In an interview with GQ, the people that worked on this commercial stated that totally missed that it had an incestuous tone to it and that the commercial felt wholesome and family friendly.