'Everyone' is Not a Target Market

One thing I have heard from many people starting a small business is that they believe everyone is in their target market. One thing to think about is that just because we have to drink water to survive does not mean we want to drink your water.

Identifying the correct target market is one step many businesses fail to accomplish. Much less accomplish properly. Learning your market is one of the most important items a business can do. If you market your product to the wrong group of consumers you will waste your time and money.

Moving back to the example about water, let us say your product is bottled drinking water. The first question a company should ask itself is who consumes their product? Well in this case, most everybody consumes water during their life. Yet, there are samples of the population who consumer more flavored beverages than water. This can be found out with surveys, either primary or secondary data techniques. Yet, finding out whether consumers prefer water or another type of drink is only the start. Once you identify who drinks water you have to ask them if they drink water, or want to drink water on the go. Some consumers may not drink water away from home/work.

This brings us to identifying the consumers who are active in sports and/or outdoor activities wither with themselves in groups. After we identify the active consumers we have to separate those into professional activities and leisure activities. You may question why this is the case, and it is because we need to identify if these active consumers prefer sport drinks over water, which from my own independent research has found that most professional athletes or extreme sport enthusiasts prefer sports drinks over water because of the added benefits in the drink. The leisure crowd can be those who enjoy casual hiking or picnicking activities either alone or with their family/friends. This is a possibility of target that we can find the most consumption of bottled water products.

Now granted, this is just as an example and as no way should be used as actual data for your business. This is just to illustrate that not everyone can be considered your target market. There are many different types of consumers with very different interests and reasons why they consume goods/services.