Target Market And Customers

Target Market And Customers: How you define your target market may have a major impact on the success of your business. Many small and new businesses would be better off if they specialized in a particular market or product niche. The more a business specializes the less it will compete directly with other businesses. Also the smaller a market niche a business chooses the less chance that a much larger firm will even compete with it at all.

For some businesses your choice of target market may be the most important element of your strategy, especially if your choice of target truly sets you off from the competition. Particularly if choice of target market appears to be a crucial business decision, you may wish to complete this section later after you have completed the strategy section of your marketing plan.

Customer Characteristics

At this point you want to group together all of the characteristics of your prospective customers even if you aren’t sure yet how any particular characteristic may help you make decisions on business strategy or tactics.

You could simply list characteristics that are more common among your customers than the general population. You could create a composite `picture` of your typical buyer. Or you could tier your discussion to first discuss characteristics shared by all potential buyers; second discuss characteristics shared by most potential buyers; and third discuss characteristics present among just some buyers. If you have a clear target market segment or market niche or geographic market in mind you will probably want to limit your discussion to characteristics of buyers within your part of the market.

Customer Needs

At first thought this section may seem trivial, but the more you think about it the more important it may appear. For example people buy cars for transportation, right? Wrong. People may use cars for transportation but they serve many other needs. Someone spending a lot of money for a name-brand luxury car is buying for a `need` other than just transportation. Someone buying a sports car with a big engine, powerful enough to more than double any legal speed limit, is buying for a `need` other than just transportation. These buyers apparently have a `need` to make a personal statement about who they are by their choice of automobile.

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These softer needs are more difficult to identify and discuss, but don’t underestimate their importance. By identifying a strong unfilled customer need you may be able to create a new market niche, position your product or service uniquely, or develop a distinctive marketing campaign.

Customer Buying Decisions

Many business plans either skip this section or include it in customer needs. However, I think it is important, especially for internal business planning, to make a clear distinction between underlying buyer needs and the actual buying process itself. By clearly identifying the buyer’s process of making the purchase decision, you will probably gain much insight in how to affect, influence and change that purchasing decision.

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It may be difficult to identify how buyers make decisions. You could take surveys of potential buyers. But this takes time and energy and might even produce misleading results. For example, on a survey buyers might tell you (and even think to themselves) that they buy because of quality or by carefully comparing features, when in reality they actually buy because of price or the security of buying a name brand. Also even in the same market niche, different buyers may use separate criteria for making their buying decisions. If this is the case in your market, then describe and rank in importance the most common ways that buyers make decisions.