Product/Audience Match Strategy

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Matching the Product with the Audience When Marketing Yourself Anthony Miyazaki Revised July 2019

Some key marketing decisions concern the selection of which audiences to serve and how to serve them. These decisions are addressed using the concepts of segmentation and target markets. Market segmentation occurs when you divide a market into distinct subsets of individuals or organizations such that (1) each subset reacts differently to your various marketing efforts and (2) the members in each subset respond similarly to various marketing efforts. By “marketing efforts,” you can think about the four P’s of marketing often discussed in basic marketing texts. In other words, the subsets might react differently to various Product features, Promotional tactics, Prices, and/or distribution channels (loosely referred to as Place). The potential target audience subsets are often referred to as market segments, and the segments that are most attractive or most useful to you may be the ones that you consider to be your target markets.

Two important aspects of segmentation are particularly relevant to a solid marketing strategy.

First, you should focus on market segments that will provide you with the most benefit given your costs of marketing to them. You might choose to target, or focus on, those segments because they have the most return on investment for your marketing efforts, because they’ll help you achieve your overall strategic goals, or because they provide other significant opportunities that are somehow attractive. Second, you should adjust your marketing efforts based on how each segment responds to those efforts. You may use a particular distribution channel or information channel for some segments, but not others. Or maybe you emphasize particular product features for one market segment, but not for another. In some cases, you might create a new version of your product that appeals to a particular segment, while maintaining the original product version for a different audience.

Segmentation and Marketing Yourself

When you market yourself, you should apply the concepts of target marketing and segmentation. Your target audiences could be different types of employers (perhaps in different industries or different geographical locations), customers (maybe wanting various services that you can offer), colleagues, bosses, employees, etc. One way to do this would be to emphasize different features, attributes, talents, etc. that you’ve determined from a Personal Raw Materials Assessment.

In the case of looking for a new job, for example, you might focus on your technical expertise when discussing a potential job with a tech company, and then highlight your creative abilities when speaking about employment with an ad agency. Or maybe you’ll segment by information

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channel by hand-delivering a resume to a local employer while emailing your LinkedIn URL for an international job opportunity. These are uses of target marketing that can be applied fairly simply once you’ve identified your market segments and know how they operate.

Product/Audience Match

To target a particular audience effectively, it’s critical to match the product you offer with the audience that you’re targeting. When it comes to marketing yourself, however, you only have one you. You can’t really offer an older, mature you to one audience (e.g., an employer) while offering a younger version to another. Because of this, the concept of having multiple products isn’t as applicable as it is when you can have multiple product versions, multiple product lines, or multiple product families when selling goods or services. You only have the ability to develop one Product You.

But this raises another set of questions pertinent to the world of Marketing Yourself: Do the product attributes determine the audience strategy? Or do the audience attributes determine the product strategy? In other words, do you choose your target audiences based on who you are (or who you’re becoming) or do you develop yourself (i.e., your skills, talents, etc.) so that you’ll match a particular set of target audiences? The answer is that you can achieve the product/audience match either way, but you should be deliberate in your approach.

There are many career counselors, life coaches, etc. who might ask you to take a series of tests and then declare the “best” career for you (even down to the industry and type of job position). This approach suggests that your “product” (i.e., “product YOU”) is static—that your skills, attributes, strengths, weaknesses, personality, etc. are rather unchangeable and that certain job positions or careers or industries would be a “bad fit” for you while others would be a “good fit.” You may find yourself taking this approach even without much outside influence. You might decide, for example, that because you haven’t excelled at math in the past, that you should avoid a career that deals with math on any significant level, even if it’s a career that you think would give you great happiness otherwise. This is a case of determining audience strategy based on your product attributes (i.e., determining your career path based on your current set of attributes or raw materials).

But now consider the other approach: that of determining the product strategy based on the desired target audience. What if, after much careful thought, you decide that you want to manage a stock market mutual fund even though you’ve had some trouble with math in the past? You like the idea of choosing the right stock and building a portfolio and then (hopefully) making money for those people who invest in your fund. At this point, you have, in essence, chosen your target audiences to whom you need to market yourself. You need to get a financial services company to hire you, get your managers to trust in your abilities to evaluate numerical information, and get potential customers to buy into your fund. Because the concept of product/audience match still applies, this means you now need to create a product strategy that will help you develop the product that these target audiences will desire. You must change you to make a solid match. This might involve long hours studying math and

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finance, paying for training or tutoring to help you learn difficult concepts, and moving yourself out of your various comfort zones.

Notice that the choose-the-audience strategy approach is normally not nearly as difficulty as the develop-the-product strategy approach. For the former, you have to first find the audience that matches your raw materials, and then market to your audience, and you’re done. But for the latter, you have to spend the time, effort, and investment in changing your product (i.e., you) to match the audience that you desire, and then still do all that marketing. The benefit of the develop-the-product approach (or more specifically, the develop-YOU approach) is that you end up pursuing a career that you truly desire, rather than settle for the one that fits the current you (that is, your current set of raw materials).

Granted, it may not always work out the way you planned. There may be target audiences that are so demanding that even years of effort on your part won’t create the “Product You” that satisfies their demands. There is always some risk and uncertainty in investment, but the payoff in this case is very much under your control. This is a judgment call that you must make.

Your Choices

Essentially, your product/audience strategy choices come down to the following:

Scenario 1: You’re lucky and your product (your skills, interests, personality, core values, etc.) are already an almost perfect match with a set of target audiences that you already know of, already know about, and are happy pursuing. If this is the case, you’re ready to start marketing yourself to those audiences using tactics based on marketing principles.

Scenario 2: You feel that there’s no way that you’ll ever change (i.e., improve) yourself, so you’d just like to find out what audiences out there (job, spouse, friends, customers, etc.) fit the current, “unchangeable” you. In this case, you need to seek out the types of audiences (employers, people, etc.) who desire what you already have, even if you don’t necessarily desire them in return. (Note that this scenario provides a good argument for wanting a “changeable” you rather than an unchangeable you.)

Scenario 3: You have some ideas of what types of audiences you’d like to target, but you don’t feel that your current Product You (your skills, interests, personality, and/or core values, etc.) will be a good match with those audiences’ demands. In this case, changing your product would be the logical choice. Using training, education, practice, behavioral change processes, etc., you can redevelop your product into one that will be more easily marketable to your chosen audiences. This redevelopment, of course, will take a lot of work.

Scenario 4: You feel willing and able to change the current Product You, but you don’t have any target audiences in mind to guide your changes. This is a difficult situation, albeit a common one. Unfortunately, some people will spend a great deal of time in this situation while they search and search for target audiences that inspire them to change, remaining stagnant in

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the meantime with fears that they shouldn’t move forward with changes until they know in which direction to head. While this might at first sound like a reasonable strategy, it’s important to understand that there are certain skills, traits, attributes, behaviors, etc. that are fairly general in their applicability to a wide variety of audiences. While waiting to discover your desired target audiences, you can use your core values to enhance basic attributes such as being hard-working, honest, cheerful, determined, dependable, thorough, innovative, helpful, educated, etc.—all characteristics that would be desired by the vast majority of most audiences. Also, don’t just wait for your desired target occupation to emerge. Actively learn about different occupations while developing your skills so that eventually you can start the product-audience matching process.

A Note on Perception vs. Reality

Some people have the idea that they can indeed be multiple products for different audiences, by merely changing the perceptions of who they are for the different audiences with whom they interact. While there’s always a certain degree of “perception management” that you’ll do when you move from audience to audience (perhaps from work to friends to family to society, etc.), the “real you” should always be represented truthfully. This doesn’t mean that you can’t emphasize certain characteristics or traits to one audience and then different characteristics or traits to another audience. Of course, you can. For example, you might be extremely loud as a basketball fan, but be more reserved or quiet in your job as an intensive care nurse. What this means is that you possess both attributes: the ability to be a boisterous fan and the ability to be a calm caregiver. You’re just choosing to display these attributes at the appropriate times for the appropriate audiences.

The important thing is to never misrepresent who you are when targeting your desired audiences. If you really don’t have particular skills, do not portray yourself as having them. Instead, put the time and effort into developing those skills, so that you can then portray them honestly. That is, always match the perception of who you are with the reality of who you are. And if there’s something you don’t like about how you’re perceived, be sure to first improve the reality and then match your perception to the New Product You.

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