Stop Targeting Demographics. Target Psychographics.
Founder and Head of Growth, White Label Comedy
The biggest lie in marketing is "create for everyone and you create for no one". If you want to be heard, you should speak to your whole addressable market, not one narrow segment. The trick is to target psychographics, how people behave and what they believe, rather than demographics like age and gender, and to write in inclusive language.
The specificity lie
For years, marketers have been told to niche down hard: pick one narrow customer avatar and speak only to them. The logic sounds tidy, but taken literally it means deliberately ignoring most of the people who might buy from you.
The truth is that most products do not have a customer defined by demographics. A 23-year-old student in India is just as likely to drink coffee as a 78-year-old executive in London. Splitting your market by age or gender throws away customers for no good reason.
Psychographics beat demographics
What your customers actually share is not their age or postcode, it is their behaviour and beliefs: their fears, their desires, the little frustrations and joys of their world in the context of what you sell.
That is what psychographics means, grouping people by how they think and act rather than who they are on paper. Speak to the shared behaviour and you reach the coffee-lover in Delhi and the one in London with the same message, because the thing that unites them was never their date of birth.
How to write to your whole market
Once you are targeting behaviour, the language does the rest. Instead of "he" or "she", which quietly cuts out half your audience, write "coffee lover" and you include everyone while still calling out exactly the right person.
Build your content on the truths your whole market recognises, and use inclusive language to deliver them, and you speak to everyone who could buy without watering the message down. That is how you capture a bigger share of your market instead of a sliver of it.
Work with us
Finding the shared truths that speak to your entire market, and writing them in language that pulls everyone in, is exactly what our team of comedy writers does before we write a word.
If you would like content that captures your whole addressable market, work with us.
Adam Hunt
Founder and Head of Growth at White Label Comedy. He spends his days convincing serious brands that funny is the most profitable thing they're not doing.
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