by Dan Gershenson, VP of Brand Strategy
I recently heard about a group of four advertising agency veterans in their 60’s and 70’s who were opening a consultancy geared toward helping brands that targeted…people in their 60’s and 70’s.
More power to them and kudos for opening their own shop. I even think it’s great that they’re specializing toward a particular segment. But the part that mildly annoyed me was a statement by one of the owners who said they were more uniquely qualified to speak to the senior audience because they were seniors.
Nice try. But I call BS on that.
Similarly, I also call BS on the notion that just because you’re a man you can talk to men better than a woman can. This kind of close-mindedness is what leads agencies to staff beer accounts with male creatives that more often than not leads to cliche “babes and booze” advertising. I’d like to see what a beer account could have with more female perspectives because I think it would be refreshing (of course, a little thing called talent would be a consideration too).
This “sameness” of age, gender, race and location does not guarantee an instant relationship to work that resonates between the agency and target audience.
Is it nice and convenient? Sure. I’ll grant that. When you’re living what your target audience goes through to the point of where you ARE the target audience, you’ve got a leg up. But standing upon that alone isn’t enough.
Terrific research, planning and creativity are still needed.
Why? For one thing, you’re just one person. And to get greater depth to see if the message is being on target, you have to get outside of your walls – whether it’s the walls of your business or the walls of your mind.
This can mean speaking with people one-on-one or in a group. Online and/or offline. Inevitably, regardless of what you think you automatically know or have in common with that person you’re speaking to, you uncover certain nuggets of insight that you never knew were there.
Because of this process, great work can be done by people who are nowhere near the target audience. I have strived to appeal to retirees, construction workers, people needing therapy, I.T. professionals and scientists. I am none of those things and I’d like to think I’ve done a good job at connecting the brands that hired me to the people they wanted to reach.
Let’s pretend I had a product I needed to market to everyone in the world who had the same name as me: Dan. Obviously, there’s a lot of guys in the world named Dan. But even though I share their name, the reality is I don’t understand all the Dans. I need to talk with them and get to know them. And in doing so, I’d find out what makes each of them individually tick. After all, we come from different backgrounds, have different aspirations and have different things we enjoy doing. To assume that I know them because I share the same name would be, of course, quite foolish.
Well, why should we be assuming things about our audience just because we happen to share the same age, skin color and gender? We can dig deeper than that. Out of respect for their complexity and sophistication, we have to.
