Branding 101: Focusing On Your Ideal Customers

Get Results: Gary Vaynerchuk quotes love customers first
Get Results: Gary Vaynerchuk quotes love customers first

Understanding who your brand is designed to appeal to, is integral in shaping your brands value proposition, it’s styling, it’s values and it’s purpose. Without this knowledge, your brand lacks focused clarity,and only by some random act of luck is it going to resonate with prospective customers.

Knowing who you don’t want as customers helps clarify who you do.

Who don’t you want sell to?

Who are your enemy customers?

For example you might generate a list like the one below..

  • projects I find objectionable,
  • clients not open to change,
  • don’t value my views,
  • key measure is hours rather than effectiveness,
  • built around cheapest options

On a large piece of paper write right in the center of the page – “Our brand does not want to appeal to people who…..”

Try to describe attitudes and outlooks when classify enemy customers rather than just easy labels, in doing so try to clarify who your customers should be but don’t get too specific or exclusive, otherwise you are limiting yourself.

From this list, identify the characteristics of your ideal customers, by flipping them as shown below …

  • projects I find objectionable – projects that are a good suit for me personally
  • clients not open to change – clients open to change
  • don’t value my views – value my views
  • key measure is hours rather than effectiveness – interested only in effectiveness
  • built around cheapest options – built around value

Branding 101