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I believe every business needs to be thinking about consumer segmentations in a much bigger way. So a segmentation is putting a group of people into a group that you’re, in this scenario, targeting. You’ve probably heard this if you’re listening, 18 to 35. That was a big one for television. They loved, for 40 years, talking about 18 to 35. I always found that humorous because as I went from 18 to 35, I couldn’t imagine a human being more different than someone at 18 and 35. You’re literally growing up during that era. So I get why TV did that. We had less targetability. It was a different era.
But segments are creating groups of people that you want to go after with a message. I like narrow targets and I like doing a lot of narrow targets because I believe the more narrow you are, the more relevant you can be to that person with that message, thus rendering them to consider what you’re talking about or what you’re selling. So as you can imagine, if I’m trying to sell this sweater to 18 to 35-year-old males, I may come up with a very general guy statement. If I’m trying to sell this to 21 to 24-year-old highly wealthy individuals that grew up in a wealthy family that live in the suburbs of London who are into football as the world calls it, or soccer as we call it in America, well, you can imagine the ad, the message has just gotten much more narrow. I may say this is what you need to wear after you played football all afternoon with your buddies and you’re going on a date or a business meeting. So you go home and you shower and you put on this nice sweater. I can say that because I know who I’m targeting, and I could say it maybe with a British accent in the scenario that I used.
So I think about it as 18 to 35-year-old males as a boulder, and instead of doing that kind of marketing, have 20 to 23-year-old London suburbian high net worth kids, 40 to 42-year-old males who’ve gone through a divorce in middle America, 22 to 25 year old, under $100,000 income males who live in Saudi Arabia. And you can imagine the pictures, the videos, the slang, the copy, and everything else of that copy, creative and advertising, is going to look very, very different even though I’m still trying to sell this green sweater. I believe that segments are imperative to advertising. And I believe in the social media world, in the emerging AI world, in the emerging Metaverse world, we’re going to have more and more narrow segments. I think the world of advertising for the last 70 years has been the first version, 18 to 35 boulder, try to make it work for everyone. My argument is we now live in a world where we have to have 1,000 pebbles make a boulder instead of one boulder.