Psychographics
When I went to the Urban Craft Uprising event at Seattle Center a couple years ago, I was in a sea of people who were exactly someone’s ideal customer.
If you’re a small business owner trying to come up with a brand identity, one of the first pictures you want in your mind is this: your ideal customer.
Listing characteristics of potential buyers is called “customer profiling.”
On its web site, Washington Small Business Development Centers encourages small business owners to really zero in on whom they’re trying to reach.
Demographics and what’s called “psychographics” — the needs, values and interests of customers — together define a target market.
You really want to be able to identify your customer so you can start from there to build your brand.
That’s why the event at the Seattle Center was so intriguing. You had about a thousand people coming specifically to look at handmade goods. They wanted to buy locally. They wanted something that would be the opposite of Wal-Mart (“big box”) shopping. They appreciated arts and crafts, and probably did their own.
“I was expecting a crowd like this,” said fellow attendee Colin Johnson, a music booker — he’s an expert in attracting the right crowd for the right show. “Mostly women, half with glasses, half with beaded jewelry.” People you’d find here would use the library, not a cafe, for WiFi access, he said. They’d look at sites like KnittaPlease.com. And when they surf the Net, they are thorough about checking links.
Now that’s the kind of detailing that really frames who was there.
