To grow your brand, narrow your audience target
How Yeti and Harley Davidson use a tip of the spear strategy to grow their base
Part of campaign development is defining your target audience. I’ve noticed that brands often get cold feet when it comes to targeting a very specific customer segment.
If we target [specific segment], will we limit ourselves to only this audience in the future?
It’s a natural concern, especially if you are responsible for bringing in sales. Wouldn’t you want to target everyone? But targeting everyone is a recipe for vanilla products and marketing that ends up exciting no one. On the contrary, focusing in on one specific audience group expands your audience
.
Take Yeti.
Yeti is a brand of outdoorsy goods including coolers, insulated drink ware, waterproof bags and apparel. Since its founding in 2006, the brand has grown to a 3 Billion+ market cap on $500M+ in revenue.
A WSJ article mentioned that even the Kardashians are fans after Kim Kardashian shared a photo of her Yeti cooler on Instagram Stories. Would Yeti take advantage of this? It could be huge media value to partner with someone like Kim. But Yeti chose not to act on it.
“It’s kind of weird for a marketing-brand person to say this…but a lot of my job is pulling the brand back, trying to ensure that we are true to ourselves without being a fad.”
— Yeti VP Marketing, Paulie Dery, WSJ
Why didn’t Yeti partner with the Kardashians? The Kardashians might have a large following, but they aren’t the audience target. Yeti is a brand for fishermen, hunters, and outdoorsy types. Fishermen are a discerning bunch — requiring high quality products that can survive travel, all-day activity, water logging, et cetera. To be associated with them doesn’t mean you are only limiting yourself to fishermen. It means you are setting the bar incredibly high. If fishermen approve, then I do as well. The Kardashians might have broad brand awareness… but they don’t offer strong associations for the quality of outdoors products.
The tip of the spear targeting strategy
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