Who are you for?

Who is your ideal customer? The answer to this question is not ‘anyone who wants to give me money’. If anyone is your ideal customer, then you will likely find that no one is your actual customer. Being for everyone is the quickest route to blandness and mediocrity. Being specific, standing for something, being for someone specific can feel scary. By being for someone specific, you’re automatically not for someone else and who wants to put potential customers off? You do, trust me. Being for everyone means being middle of the road, bland, unremarkable. The unremarkable bit is key. Remarkable means ‘worth remarking on’. If you’re unremarkable why would anyone bother to tell their friends? It’s worth noting that remarkable isn’t the same as wacky, or quirky or edgy. You can be any of those things, if that’s the right fit for your business and your customers. But you could also be remarkable for how warm and caring your customer service is.

In order to meet the needs of your ideal customer, you need to know what matters to them. What do they believe? What do they care about. How do they want to feel? It isn’t about demographics it’s about psychographics. Your ideal customer isn’t a woman aged 25-35 who is university educated. It’s people who believe that food, people and place matter, who crave joy and a sense of fun (that’s my bakery’s ideal customer, they can be yours as well if you like). When you understand who your ideal customer is and what they really want, beyond just something to eat, you can see how best to serve them. And that it the path to being worth remarking on.

For further reading on this I would recommend This is Marketing by Seth Godin, these are ideas I first discovered through him.