Choosing an audience by accident.
The most expensive marketing mistake is not a bad campaign. It is a target that was ill defined. Here is how the audience decision gets made by accident, and what it costs your business.
- Marketing to everyone happens in pieces.
- Ask four people who the priority audience is. Count the answers.
- After a miss, watch whether the debate is about the channel or the audience.
- Positioning and measurement both break downstream of no decision.
Ask a founder who their marketing is for and you almost always get a good answer. Ask four people at the same company and you get four good answers. Are they aligned?
How it actually happens
A founder describes the product to an investor and the sentence that lands gets reused. Sales joins and needs pipeline this quarter, so the message widens to include whoever answers. Somebody rewrites the website and does not want to exclude a segment, so the headline goes one notch more general. A sponsorship comes up and the budget follows the room that is available rather than the room that matters.
4 reasonable calls. The problem is that nobody went back afterward.
The second tell
Arguing about the audience means reopening something nobody remembers deciding.
A target audience nobody argued for is one nobody can defend when the numbers come up short.
What it costs
Positioning goes first. You cannot say what makes you the obvious choice without knowing what that choice it is.
Measurement goes next. No named audience and no defined outcome means nothing to compare results against, so reporting drifts toward volume. Everyone can see the numbers changed. Nobody can say whether the business did.
A good team can spend two quarters executing well against a target that was never right, which is the expensive version of skipping the evidence step.
Making the call on purpose
This is where people expect me to recommend a research project. That is usually not what is missing. What is missing is a decision, argued from evidence, written down, and dated: which people matter most to the outcome, what needs to change in what they believe or do, where you are choosing not to compete, and what would have to be true for this to be the wrong call.
That last one separates a decision from a preference. A preference has no failure condition. A decision names the evidence that would overturn it, which is what lets you revisit it later without relitigating everything.
It is also why this is the first part of how we work. The message, the plan, the channels, and the reporting all inherit from it.
Not only a buyer problem
The same failure runs inside companies. A security team rolls out a control and treats the whole organization as one audience. The message gets written for the people who already care, the resistance comes from a group nobody named, and adoption stalls somewhere the reporting cannot see.
Executive sponsorship, behavior change, adoption, readiness. All audience problems before they are communication problems, and the question does not change. Who matters most here, and what needs to be different for them.
You are going to have a target audience either way. The only question is whether you picked it.
Free tool: telos, our free organizational clarity tool.
Part of our work on positioning.