Somehow, the combination of recent happenings and seeing a young woman perform the song from the Apple Macbook Air commercial reminded me of an important lesson I learned in 20 years in advertising: Understand your target audience. I learned this lesson both professionally and personally, and I'll go over the professional part here.
Before you start to advertise you need to be sure who it is you're talking to. First of all, for whom does the product solve a problem? Problems come in all shapes and sizes:
- I'm hungry or thirsty
- Something hurts
- Something's dirty
- I'm leaking somewhere or something is inappropriately growing on or falling off me
- Something smells bad
- I desperately want to appear cool
For example, if you sell sports cars and want to appeal to middle aged men, you can't speak to them the same way you would if you sell children's vitamins and want to appeal to new parents. In one case, you'd use adjectives and scenery that represent things that are pretty universally found to be cool by 40-somethings, like driving along the Pacific Coast (connotes freedom), bypassing city traffic (connotes power) or a beautiful woman (connotes, well, you know). In the other, you'd want everything to focus on nurturing, optimism, caring for those unable to care for themselves. What's fun about working on this stuff is that the same people can be in both targets. I had a new kid when I was 38. And you have to sort out what's the right way to talk to the same person about different things in different ways.
What does this have to so with anything? Communication is a multi-part process. You say or do something and someone else receives it in their own way, which may not be what you're expecting if you haven't thought about it in advance.
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