Everyone is not a target audience

Costco sells tires, caskets, hearing aids, engagement rings and a hot dog. It can be everything to everyone because it has built a business model that only works at that scale. Almost nobody reading this has that model, and almost nobody should try.

Yet ask most owners who their target audience is and the answer comes back: everyone. Anyone who needs what we do.

It sounds ambitious. It usually means something else.

What “everyone” actually means

It means the decision has not been made yet.

Not that the business serves everyone, but that nobody has sat down and chosen who matters most. And that choice has to be made somewhere, so it gets made by default, a hundred small times, by whoever is writing the email or picking the photograph that afternoon.

Because once everyone is the audience, the message has to work for everyone too. And a message built to work for everyone is a message built to offend nobody, which is a different and much weaker thing.

What it costs

Four symptoms, and they almost always arrive together.

• Vague messaging. “We have solutions for all your needs.” Technically true, says nothing, could sit on any competitor’s homepage without changing a word.
• Generic visuals. Safe enough not to put anybody off. Memorable to nobody.
• Too many offers. Something for everybody, which means nothing is clearly for anybody.
• Scattered marketing. Every platform, every trend, every audience, because without a defined audience there is no principle for deciding where not to be.

The result is a business that is everywhere, and nobody is quite sure who it is for.

Targeting is not excluding

This is where owners get nervous, and the nervousness is reasonable. If we focus on one audience, do we lose everyone else?

No. Defining a target audience does not mean nobody else can buy from you. It means this is who the business is designed to resonate with most.

The shop door stays open. You are choosing who to speak to, not who to serve.

Who could buy is not who you build for

Take a company providing IT services. Technically it could work with startups, law firms, medical practices, manufacturers, retailers, companies of a hundred people and companies of five thousand. Any of them could become a customer, and over time most kinds probably will.

But it might deliberately build its marketing around one group:

Growing businesses of fifty to two hundred and fifty people, who have outgrown the person in the office who is good with computers, but are not ready to hire an internal IT department.

Nothing about that sentence turns away a law firm. What it does is give every subsequent decision somewhere to point. The message gets sharper. The service descriptions get clearer. The sales conversation gets easier, because the person on the other end recognizes themselves in the first thirty seconds.

That is targeting. It is not excluding.

What changes when you know

Everything downstream stops being guesswork.

• Your branding can look like something they identify with, rather than something inoffensive.
• Your message can speak to problems they actually have, in the words they actually use.
• Your offer can solve something they actually need, rather than covering every eventuality.
• Your content can talk about what they care about, which is also how you find out what to write.
• Your advertising can reach people plausibly likely to buy, instead of buying reach for its own sake.

Marketing stops being a series of individually defensible decisions that add up to nothing in particular.

“Business owners” is not enough either

Most attempts at this stop one level too early. Industry, company size, revenue, location, job title. That is a filter, not an audience. It tells you who they are on paper and nothing about why they would ever call you.

The useful questions are situational.

• What is happening in their business right now?
• What are they trying to fix?
• What are they slightly embarrassed is not better than it is?
• What keeps getting pushed down the priority list because it is nobody’s actual job?
• What would finally make them say: right, we need help with this?

Positioning starts at that last question. Everything above it is demographics.

An example, since it would be strange not to

This is where we should probably demonstrate the principle rather than describe it.

Thorianne is built for established businesses that are genuinely good at what they do. You have customers who know it and a reputation that proves it. And then somebody visits your website, and your brand does not look remotely as good as the business actually is. There is a gap between the quality of the work and the quality of the first impression, and you have known about it for a while.

Or perhaps you have taken over an established business. It came with history, customers, revenue and a decent name. Then you looked at the website, the logo, the messaging and the marketing materials, and thought: this does not represent what this company has become.

If neither of those is you, you are almost certainly not a Thorianne client. That is not a failure of this page. It is the entire point of it.

Specific does not make you smaller

Not everyone who reads this becomes a potential client, and that is the design rather than a defect. The work is not to make a large number of people think “that might be relevant to me one day”. It is to make the right person stop and think: that is exactly us.

A brand that tries to be legible to everybody ends up being memorable to nobody. Choosing who you are for does not shrink the business. It is the thing that lets every other decision get sharper, which is what makes the business feel bigger than it is.

Unless you are Costco. In which case, carry on.