Great Small Business Ideas to Start: Redefine your audience
Finding new audiences for your product can allow you to broaden your sales potential and escape crowded markets.
The idea
Do you think you know who the best people are to target with your marketing? Think again. Reconsidering who may be interested in your products opens up a new world of potential customers, for the company intrepid enough to fin d a new audience for its advertising.
The Polish division of the brewing firm Carlsberg decided to create a beer to be marketed primarily to women. Karmi, a beer with a low alcohol content and high emphasis on flavor, was colorfully packaged and launched on International Women’s Day. This was a bold move in an industry that typically focuses on selling to a male clientele, with advertising campaigns usually centering around sports sponsorship deals and scantily clad models.
This strategy of redefining your audience was also followed by British clothing retailer Marks & Spencer, after its reputation for catering to older female clientele became insufficient to sustain its business. Marks & Spencer decided to expand into a younger, more style-focused market, and launched Per Una, a new range of clothes designed to appeal to women in their twenties and thirties. While it had traditionally emphasized comfort over style, the decision to present a fashion-forward image helped Marks & Spencer broaden its appeal—and turn around its flagging sales.
In practice
- Seek an external view of your market—for example, by talking to customers, by benchmarking with other businesses, or by appointing new employees from outside the business.
- Focus on how you could adjust your product to appeal to a new audience.
- Maintain the core principles of your product—while you should add new selling points to appeal to new audiences, do not discard your original ones.
- Do not neglect your old market—maintain committed relationships with all your intended audiences.
- Remember that it can be difficult to move into a new market, especially if that market is crowded. Choose your new audience wisely.