The Brain Audit

by Sean D'Souza

  But notice something else. Notice that our ‘birthday-boy’ wasn’t the only person born in that particular week. Or that particular day. On that day/week, there would have been thousands, or tens of thousands of crying babies who shared the same date/week of birth. For all of whom the TIME magazine cover would be spot-on.

  And then again, it might not be spot-on after all.

  The concept of ‘target audience’ is misleading, because while audiences may appear to be similar, their individual needs may vary wildly.

  Because we’re not talking about an audience.

  We’re talking about one person. One person who would actually appreciate getting a TIME cover.

  I might.

  You might.

  But the ‘birthday-boy’ may actually be looking forward to a PLAYBOY cover instead of a TIME cover. Or no cover at all. And despite your best intentions, you’ve only been guessing about the relevance of the gift. While you’ve got the whole issue of ‘target audience’ quite right, you’ve got the profile horribly wrong. What you need to have isn’t quite an audience, but a ‘target profile’ instead. So the question must arise: what is this strange term that goes by the name of ‘target profile’?

  Target profile is simply the factor of choosing one person.

  Not an entire audience.

  But one solitary person.

  And then crafting your message to that one person.

  Of course, you don’t believe me.

  Trying to send a message to just one person seems like marketing suicide.

  But suspend your disbelief for a while, and read on. Because we need to understand how to construct a ‘target profile’. And to make sure we construct a great profile, we need to start with the difference between ‘target profile’ and ‘target audience’.

  And a good place to start is the concept of ‘target audience’. What indeed is a ‘target audience’?

  We can answer this question quite simply if we take a sample of three women sitting in a café. Let’s assume they’re all in their 30’s. They all live in the same neighbourhood. They all went to the same schools, even the same university and graduated in the same year. All of them have the average of 2.2 kids. They all like wearing jeans. They all love buying shoes. And if you look at the data on paper, they seem alike.

  And marketers call this ‘factor of similarity’ a ‘target audience’.

  And they label it with the term ‘demographics’. A demographic is essentially a segregation of a group of people on the basis of what makes them similar. So if they’ve got certain similarities then you put them aside and you say, “Hey, these are women, same neighbourhood, same university, kids, jeans, shoes, etc.”

  On paper they all look alike.

  Well, let’s suppose you wanted to sell jeans to these women.

  Now you know that they like jeans, because hey, there they were in the cafe, and they were all wearing jeans. On paper a sale of this nature would seem simple. But there’s a bit of a problem that crops up.

  And the problem is very simple.

  The first woman weighs 107 pounds (which is 49 kilos). The second woman weighs 132 pounds (which is 60 kilos). The third woman weighs 200 pounds (which is 91 kilos). And that’s just their weight. Not their height or shape.

  Yes, you’re selling a generic product like jeans. And you’re selling it to a demographic. Logically, you should be able to sell it to all of these three women, without a problem.

  But to your frustration you find that the women aren’t really buying jeans.

  They’re buying into a solution. And to work out the solution, we first have to define the problem. One woman may be considering the comfort of the jeans as the top priority. Another is considering colour. The third may be considering the cut.

  Each one will be buying her jeans on a completely different parameter. And that parameter is paramount to them. In fact, that parameter will come before all other parameters.

  All very fine when you’re considering three women in a cafe. But hey, does this profiling actually work? Does it actually make money? Does it actually get customers?

  The Body Shop didn’t target all women. It targeted women who were against cosmetics being tested on animals. The targeting was based on a specific profile.

  For this we have to go back to Brighton, England.

  In the year 1976, Anita Roddick started a tiny little store in Brighton, England. It was a cheeky little store called ‘The Body Shop’. Cheeky because as Anita herself said, “It was hard (to start up). It was breathtakingly funny. I was stuck between two funeral parlours who objected to the name The Body Shop because coffins would pass by a couple of times a day.”

  Despite the rather ordinary name, it’s not the products that got the attention of its customers—and subsequently the attention of the world’s press. Because you see, Anita’s products were simply beauty products for women.

  And beauty products are a dime a dozen today, as they were back in 1976.

  Yet, Anita wasn’t talking to all women. She wasn’t even speaking to women who used beauty products. But instead she spoke to a specific problem. At the time—and even possibly today—the ingredients of beauty products were tested on animals. And Anita was tackling this specific issue: the problem of ethical consumerism.

  We know little about the funeral parlours. But we do know that Anita Roddick went on to create a business that millions of women were attracted to. And in the year 2006, when Anita finally decided to sell the business to L’Oréal, she did so for a cool fee of £652 million!

  Think about it. A tiny business. A business not a heck of a lot different from those funeral parlours that were simply appealing to a demographic. Yet Anita changed it all by appealing to a profile. And it’s this profiling (among other things) that catapulted The Body Shop into the brand that it is today.

  What works for cosmetics works just as well for products and services.

  From products such as tractors, to ball bearings, to services such as marketing, consulting or workshops.

  There’s not one product/service on this planet that can’t be sharpened with precise profiling. And precise profiling works on the basis of one person.

  Is there a market for Size 5 shoes? You wouldn’t think so, would you? Yet even a casual search on the internet brings up several sites based on a specific ‘target profile’.

  Like my wife, Renuka. When Renuka goes out to buy shoes, she runs into a massive problem. Like every other woman, she likes her shoes. But she’s got tiny feet, and hence she spends loads of time simply going from shoe-shop to shoe-shop in search of her size.

  Now just like every other woman, she’s concerned about colour, fit, shape, comfort, etc. But what good is that laundry list when she can’t even get her size? So what is Renuka’s dream? To find a store that’s called ‘The Renuka Shoe Store’. And in that store, they stock just Size 5 shoes. From the top to bottom, they have Size 5, in every colour, every type, every material, every level of comfort and for every occasion. Imagine a store like that. Do you think that Renuka would even bother going to another shoe store?

  Could you open a vegetarian-only pizza parlour? Do you think vegetarians would pay a little more just to make sure that there’s no chance of any meat in sight at the pizzeria? There are a dozen or more niches for everything, y’know! And the good news is: all the niches aren’t taken yet.

  But surely you think, that’s ridiculous.

  Building a business around one person is insane. Surely you can’t hope to earn a living creating such a tiny niche. But is it a tiny niche? Because how many ‘Renukas’ exist in the city of Auckland? How many ‘Renukas’ exist in New Zealand? And how many of them exist on this side of the planet, let alone the entire world?

  They must exist, and it must be reasonably profitable, because even a casual search at Google throws up sites all over the world. In five seconds, I was able to find www.feetpetite.co.nz, www.daintyfeet.com, www.cinderellaofboston.com, www.small-shoes.
co.uk, and www.zappos.com. And believe me, I wasn’t even really trying to research the subject thoroughly. I just clicked on the first link that Google threw up.

  It does seem that there exists a market—and a profitable market too—for a business built on the profile of one person. We see this market when we look at The Body Shop—which incidentally started out as just one store, and not a global corporation. We see this as we look at shoe stores which cater to women who have the problem of finding shoes for tiny feet.

  And yet we have to understand that there are more shoe stores that cater to general audiences, and still do well. They too make profits. They too have nice balance sheets. But there’s a slight difference when you build a business on the basis of a specific profile.

  And that difference is one of specifics.

  That when you build a business with one person in mind, you attract hundreds, thousands, even millions of customers. In fact, you don’t have to go far to see how this concept of profiling was used, and continues to be used.

  On September 7, 1998, an unknown company called Google was privately registered while the founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still at Stanford University. Google was unknown at the time as a search engine. And if you looked around, there were tons of search engines. They went by the names of HotBot, Alta Vista, Yahoo!, Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Excite (amongst others).

  So how did Google stand out from this gaggle of search engines? It stood out with its clear interface. When you went to Google.com, you only had one box to fill; one thing to see. The profile was clearly a person who was sick and tired of having to deal with clutter. Google was designed for a person who despised the clutter.

  And you know the rest of the story, don’t you?

  Armed with that early boost, Google.com[7] has gone on to become one of the biggest brand names on the planet. And yes, they had good search algorithms. And yes, they did this and did that, but at the very core they appealed to a profile. Which then ballooned into an audience. Which now pretty much has ballooned into half the planet.

  Target profiling works.

  All you need to know is how to use it to your advantage. And that’s what we’re about to find out.

  Creating a Profile

  Let’s start at the top: how do you create a profile?

  Step 1: Start with a demographic

  Step 2: Choose a real person from that demographic

  Step 3: Speak to that person and find out their list of problems (with regard to a product/service)

  Step 4: Choose one problem then expand it

  Step 5: Use a real person to get feedback.

  So let me explain how all of this works.

  Imagine you’re looking for a date on a website such as Match.com. What you do is start with a demographic. You’re either a guy looking for a girl. Or a girl looking for a guy. Or a girl looking for a girl, or a guy looking for a guy. Those are essentially the parameters. Or the demographics.

  Step 1: Choose a demographic.

  The first thing you have to start off with is a demographic. A demographic is what will give you an idea of whether you’re speaking to a specific age group, specific profession, etc. And we saw a demographic of a group of women earlier. They were people who liked their coffee, went to the same university, 2.2 kids, wearing jeans, shoes, etc. That’s a demographic. And so we get this demographic when we’re looking for this ‘ideal mate’ on Match.com.

  But there’s a problem instantly. Because if you were to search for demographics, you’d instantly get twenty dozen people who fit your ‘demographic’ description. And even if they all look like your ideal man/woman, you’ve got a big problem if you try and contact all of them.

  So you move to Step 2: Choose a real person.

  You’ve moved from the ‘drop down boxes’ where you chose age/city/country in order to find someone whom you were looking for. Now you’re scanning for something. On Match.com you’ll be scanning for faces to begin with. And soon you’ll find that real person. Or the profile of that real person. And you’ll start to read more about that real person.

  And want to contact that real person. But do you see what’s happening? You’ve stepped out of the ‘perfect person’ zone and stepped into the ‘real person’ zone.

  Aha, Step 3: See the criteria/needs/problems of that real person.

  Of course they don’t call it problems on Match.com. They call it criteria, or ‘About Me’. Then this person tells us what he/she really wants. And doesn’t want.

  And then it’s Step 4: Expanding the criterion.

  Get the person to choose one criterion that he’s/she’s really interested in.

  And I can tell you right away, that there are twenty-dozen criteria. But if he’s/she’s really smart, or really keen, he’s/she’s bound to tell you that one thing that he/she is really interested in. That’s what you need to pay attention to, because as I said, ‘he/she will tell you’. You need to talk to your profile to get the one problem out. You can’t afford to sit at your desk imagining the problems the ‘target profile’ could/should have. You have to talk.

  You then stop fiddling around with all the criteria and focus on that one criterion. That one thing is bigger, more important than everything else. And you hone in, and talk to him/her about that one thing over and over, until you know everything there is to know about that one criterion.

  Then you feed it back to the person in Step 5.

  Ask them if that one criterion is what he/she wants. Brainstorm with your ‘target profile’ to flesh out the one problem they’ve identified. And watch as his/her eyes twinkle. If you’re saying the right thing you’ll get delight in the voice.

  You’ll get excitement.

  If you’re sitting in front of that person, you’ll see the gentle nod of the head. But if you’re saying the wrong thing, that person will sound confused. Or be scowling just a tiny bit. This playing back of the biggest issue to the person is critical to find out if you’ve indeed heard what he’s/she’s ‘actually’ been saying—and that you’re not hearing what you want to hear.

  When you’ve gone through all the five steps, you’ve now got a very decent idea of how to create a profile. When we profile real clients, we have to follow the very same system. And just for good measure, let’s take an example of a real person, and go through those five steps once more. This time we’ll use a real client (notice how many times I’m saying the word ‘real’.)

  Going through the five steps with a real client.

  Let’s start off at the top. We choose the demographic. And that demographic is women looking to buy shoes.

  Now from that demographic, let’s choose a real person. We choose a real person like Renuka. And we say, “OK fine. There are 50 women or 100 women or 2,000 women in this suburb, and we’re going to choose one person in order to get to a profile”.

  And then we either call Renuka or we sit down with her over her favourite ‘iced-coffee’, and we talk to her about shoes. And what are her criteria for buying shoes. List all the criteria. And the problems she has with getting shoes. As you talk to her, you’ll get the usual list: size, comfort, colour, etc. And now it’s time to get Renuka to tell you which one of those problems is the biggest—and most frustrating of them all.

  And it’s at this point that things get really interesting.

  Because this is the part where we get the terminology, the emotion, the logic, the ‘everything’ from the customer. In her own words. And believe me, you don’t want to stop her talking. Let her do the talking. You do the recording. Do the questioning. And do the writing.

  Let her talk, because she’s going to tell you things you could never make up sitting at your desk. And if you give her enough time, she’s going to tell you the real reason why she wants those shoes.

  You take that information and you create your sales page.

  You take that information and you write your article. You take that information and create your presentation. Because that person has g
one from a vague ‘target audience’, to a real person with a real list of problems.

  And then you move to the feedback stage.

  You read back what you’ve heard. And watch the expression and body language. Listen to the tone of voice. You’re asking for feedback. You want to pay close attention to make sure that you’ve actually heard what you’ve heard.

  And you’ve got a profile. A profile that’s individual to Renuka. A profile like no other.

  Which brings us back to our two examples:

  Example 1: Website strategy workshop

  Example 2: An allergy clinic

  Website strategy workshop

  Target Profile: Howard R.

  Howard is a real person. He sells products and services on the internet but wasn’t sure how to go forward. The words are his. He told me, “I didn’t feel like a monster, but in order to ‘play the game’ at the highest level I’d have to become one, or at least act like one. I never got to the point where I was doing anything that disgusted me. I just couldn’t see a path to growth that didn’t involve ‘guru bullshit’”.’

  Problem: Are you sick and tired of internet systems that force you to become a ‘monster’? (Most internet-training systems ‘convince’ you to do things that you think are yucky. They make you believe, the only way to get sales, is to use methods that border on ‘sleazy behaviour’. So is there a way to be ethical and still bring in growing amounts of revenue?