Difference Boundaries in Marketing: Who Benefits from Your Product?

When building name recognition for your products, it is often difficult to decide where to start and who to start with. The ideal approach is to start by defining your target market and audience. The target market is the population for whom your product is intended, often characterized by gender, age and personal interests. The target audience is a subset of the target market that has a higher potential to respond actively to your message by not only purchasing the product, but also sharing it with others. You can systematically determine your ideal target audience based on your mission statement and key characteristics. This is important because your target audience will likely give the best response to your products and services.

Sharpening Your Focus

Part of designing a good product is ensuring that it is useful to virtually anyone, but marketing must start with a much narrower target. For example, our research group at the Peace Innovation Institute is advertising a workshop on ethical finance. Every participant in the economy handles finance on some level, and every member of society has a responsibility for ethical engagement. Most working adults with a steady income already have reliable financial habits. Undergraduate college students and young adults, however, do not have this experience and have more positive changes from financial education. 

Most college students are inexperienced with managing new income and have trouble increasing the value they have, so learning ethical financial habits is much more useful to them than it is to established professionals. Retirees who have many liquid assets but no active streams of income would also benefit from learning to passively create income from their assets. In our case, target audience is not defined by demographic information like age or gender, but rather by education and vocation. Instead our audience is defined by common psychographics, individualistic factors that inform a decision to purchase something (e.g. motivation, self-concept, lifestyle). The key psychographic factor is the desire to become economically self-sufficient without formal coursework in personal finance. It's important to understand your audience's motivation for your product because it allows you to be more clear with your positioning, and attract the right people.

Identifying the Substantial Difference Boundaries

When determining who will benefit most from your product, it is important to understand your audience's motivation for your product and to look at your product or service from other perspectives. Difference boundaries are important because they summarize the needs and preferences of potential customers. Difference boundaries are used to distinguish individual identities. The most common examples of difference boundaries (known as the Big 8) are gender, age, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, ability, sexual orientation, religion, and culture. Less common examples include education level, career choice, place of residence, place of origin, access to technology, favorite hobbies, just to name a few. 

An example of a company using common difference boundaries to their marketing advantage is a company called Inglot, which makes halal nail polish for Muslim women. Still, two female college students with identical demographic information may have completely opposite interests. If you market a product, like makeup, toward these two women, you cannot ensure a successful sale with both of them because not every female college student has interest in makeup. Interest in makeup and beauty products is a kind of psychographic, which dives further into potential customers’ lifestyles than traditional demographics. Difference boundaries are key for defining demographics and psychographics, which are crucial to identifying your target audience. The key is to understand your target audience more as people than as statistics. 

Priming the Target Audience by Their Difference Boundaries

Determining target market and audience is crucial for small businesses and startup companies that seek case studies on how they can most effectively market their products and services. Knowledge of marketing tactics is applicable to anyone distributing an idea or product, whether they are politicians, consumers, or small business owners. Much of our research is specifically on independent startups who would like to effectively market their products. In this scenario an effective marketing strategy is defined as a process that “intends to find, satisfy, and retain customers, while the business makes a profit.” Once you have analyzed the pertinent difference boundaries to determine the best audience,  you need to create an effective lead magnet for this audience to gain interest in your product/service. This lead magnet acts as a “bridge” to connect this group to your company, and is created based on what would bring the most value to the audience. For example, discounts or free samples for products to the right people will instill an interest in the company and future consideration for that companies’ products.

Conclusion 

Presenting to an audience is an episode of engagement, and as with any episode of engagement, it is important to know who is involved and what difference boundaries distinguish them. An understanding of how both you and the audience can gain the most from an interaction informs who to present to, and how to create the best experience for everyone involved. Pshychographic, demographic, behavioral, and geographical factors data are all useful data points for determining best target audiences for any product or service. The next time any of you are planning to present something to an audience you should carefully think about who you should present to. As a result, you will get the best understanding, feedback, and appreciation of your work.

If you would like to learn more about marketing and difference boundaries, visit the Peace Innovation Institute’s website!

Written and edited by: Catherine Quinn, Neil McNair Jr., David Gerstenfeld, Dieondra Garner, Raaghav Seth, Jake Lieberstein, and Inesse Hanna