If Everyone Is Your Customer, Nobody Is

One of the easiest sentences to write in a marketing plan is:

“Our target audience is everyone.”

It is also one of the least useful.

There are products with enormous potential markets, of course, and broad reach is incredibly important for growing brands. But that does not mean every person has the same needs, motivations or value to a business. Segmentation is not about making your market artificially tiny. It is about recognising meaningful differences within it.

I think there is sometimes a misunderstanding of segmentation because marketers can take it too far. We create elaborate personas, give imaginary customers names, decide what coffee they drink and invent entire lives for people we have never met. That can create the appearance of customer understanding without actually telling us anything useful.

For me, a useful segment needs to affect a marketing decision.

At Aberystwyth Town, a local business considering sponsorship has a fundamentally different relationship with the football club from a parent looking for a family activity on Saturday afternoon. A lifelong supporter buying a season ticket is different from somebody visiting Aberystwyth for the weekend. They may all ultimately enter the same stadium, but the reasons they might do so are very different.

The same is true within Cardiff Met Sport. A current student looking for recreational activity, an international-level athlete considering where to study, a local resident interested in gym membership and a parent booking a child onto a sports camp should not simply receive identical marketing because they all interact with the same organisation.

Segmentation helps us understand those differences.

The important stage comes afterwards: targeting.

Once we have identified different parts of the market, we have to decide where our resources will make the greatest difference. That decision might change by campaign. A university recruitment campaign may prioritise prospective students while a summer commercial campaign concentrates on community memberships, camps or facility hire.

This is where segmentation links directly back to strategy. Resources are finite. Budget is finite. Staff time is finite. Attention is finite. Choosing a target does not mean saying everybody else is unwelcome. It means deciding where you are going to concentrate effort.

There is also a useful tension here with the evidence around brand growth. Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass work rightly challenges marketers who make target markets so narrow that they remove most potential buyers from consideration. Brands generally need penetration and broad mental availability to grow.

I don't see those arguments as contradictory.

A brand can want widespread awareness while still recognising that different groups have different needs. You can build fame broadly and activate more specifically. You can ensure lots of potential buyers know you exist while tailoring propositions and messages where there is a meaningful reason to do so.

Good segmentation should help us understand the market.

It should not shrink it unnecessarily.