Viper Marketing & Communications Group

Who are you really designing for?

Author: Jim Hardcastle

Jim helps people plan and deliver effective communications. His background in the countryside sector provide him with a wealth of experience in rural marketing. Facilitation, fueled by coffee, with Post-Its at the ready, he’s here to help .

One of the hardest things in the world to do is to put yourself in the place of your target audience, but this is such an important thing to do. We spend lots of time working with clients to identify their target audiences for their product or service. Then, when presenting concepts or visuals their emotions override their intellect. We hear the classic ‘I prefer that design’, to which we always reply ‘ah, but it’s not about you. It’s about your target audience’.

We, as humans, are very good at knowing what we like. We all have different tastes and long may that last. It leads to the rich culture that we enjoy. Put a design in front of someone and instantly they’ll be able to tell you whether they like it or not. Emotions kick in: ‘I like that’.

But what if it’s not for you? What if you’re trying to sell Saga holidays or skateboards? You may not fall into either target audience for these products but you should be able to make the intellectual jump to see designs that would attract people to these products.

We try to make this intellectual jump easy when we’re planning our target audiences. We work with clients to flesh them out as human beings - we look at where they shop, what they read, the type of house they live in and, importantly, we give them a human name.

It’s hard to remember all the socio-economic details around an audience. It’s easy to remember ‘Kit’ the skateboarder or ‘Edward’ the Saga holidaymaker. The names conjur up a mental image of our audience. Then when making decisions about designs or marketing tools or you have to do is ask the simple question, ‘would Kit like this?’
 

- Posted on Monday 15 Nov 2010 at 09:19 by Jim Hardcastle

Tags: audience (33), design (23), viper (64)