Not all Target Markets are Created Equal

As marketers, we like to categorize people into groups: Gen X, Baby-boomers, married, single, multi-cultural, etc. For the most part, putting people into these categories makes our job easier. You are able to find out who is interested in your product, put a name to that group of people and put some ads in front of them.

Recently, however, I was in a situation that made me realize that there are large groups of people that don't fit into the typical categories that marketers use to target their products. That sentence might make me sound naive, but let me explain my story before you judge.

Over the holiday, I was playing Catchphrase with my sisters and cousins and I had to get them to say the word "Twitter." I described it as being "a popular social networking site...not Facebook." My younger sister was able to guess the word, but once I announced that Twitter was, in fact, the popular social networking site that I was referring to, my teenage cousin from kind of huffed...he thought it was ridiculous that I would refer to Twitter as a popular site. Sure, he's heard of it, and he uses social media (he's very active on Facebook and MySpace)...but Twitter? Not something that he would consider using.

That's fine, I know a lot of people who don't enjoy using Twitter, it's not as easy nor as interactive as Facebook...but all of those people would, undoubtedly, still consider the site to be immensely popular...or would they? If you are a high school boy that doesn't use Twitter, and none of your friends use Twitter, and the only people you know of who do use the site are famous-for-no-reason-celebrities and unreliable news channels, you probably wouldn't consider it to be popular.

Now, I'm not saying that marketers are incapable of finding and filling the holes within a target market...After all, I'm an advertiser and I discovered this little lapse of "Twitter acceptance." I'm just saying that it often becomes easy to group people into a category that seems to fit your product, but a good advertiser, a good planner, looks deeper than that.