Direct hit: want to hit a marketing bull's-eye? Set your sights on a smaller target

Entrepreneur, Oct, 1996 by Janean Chun

Historically, marketers were accustomed to working in broad strokes. Mass was the word of the day, and consumers were usually perceived as white, middle-aged, middle class - your basic homogeneous unit. The vehicle of choice was the phone book-sized catalog a la Sears; the market of choice included anyone who fell between the ages of 18 to 49. The flavor of advertising was, as a rule, bland. Clip art advertising painted a Beaver Cleaver picture of American society: everyone drinking the same milk, buying the same refrigerator, wearing the same trousers.

The baby boom heard round the world changed all that. Add the awakening of ethnic and cultural pride, the power of the growing senior market and the onslaught of the Information Age, and you have markets begging to be sharpened down into increasingly microscopic levels. Consequently, marketing in the '90s is becoming akin to taking apart a set of Russian nesting dolls - each shell, reveals a smaller piece of the apparently similar constituent. Its no longer good enough to remove the first banister to behold the 50-plus market, or the baby boomer market, or the ethnic market. It's uncovering that tiny doll in the middle that's the key to your success.

Consider that a few years ago, you'd be exalted as cutting-edge if you launched a campaign specifically targeting blacks. Now that's considered passe, even borderline offensive. Marsha Feltingoff, owner of Alma International Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, points out you can no more use the same marketing strategy to reach a black teenager and a black baby boomer than you could to reach a black teen and a white senior citizen.

Consequently, Feltingoff has built her $20 million company on a marketing strategy as diverse as her audience. She markets African jewelry to an adult black market via glossy black packaging, an upscale gold emblem, and an infomercial that combines authentic African music and a message clearly encouraging cultural pride. Meanwhile, Feltingoff appeals to the younger black market through the Internet: Her Web site, which markets information on musical artists, features a nightclublike atmosphere, bold graphics, and hip cultural and linguistic references.

"I take a very direct approach to [marketingl," says Feltingoff. "I like to peel away the layers of the onion and get to the core of each market-place I want to reach."

Feltingoff represents a new wave of entrepreneurs who know they must become fluent in niche marketing to stay one step ahead of todays marketing-savvy consumer. "It's much easier to throw jelly beans up in the air and hope they fall in the right place. But that leaves a lot to chance," says Feltingoff, who dabbles in specific market segments via joint ventures or equity investments. "If you take the time to know your market, if you do the homework and build the foundation, you can hone in on that consumer - and your success rate is going in to be a lot greater."

* DIFFERENT FOLKS

"There has been an enormous change in the marketplace," says Ross E. Goldstein, president of Generation insights, a San Francisco consulting firm that tracks trends. "The consumer marketplace has become so differentiated, its a misconception to talk about the marketplace in any kind of general, grand way. You have to talk about specific corners of the marketplace. And the imperative for the marketer is to really understand who your consumers are on a number of different levels: what their motivation is, how a particular product or service fits into their lives, what they're looking for, what options are available."

The challenge is to pick a niche, any niche, because "there are a zillion of them," Goldstein says. "You can market to socioeconomic status or to region or to gender or to lifestyle or to technological sophistication. There's no end to the number of different ways you can slice the pie."

To get a feel for just how exact a science marketing has become, consider these statistics.

* Female baby boomers influence 80 percent of leisure decisions and conduct 44 percent of business travel.

* Vocabulary levels of 18 to 25-year-olds dropped sharply between 1940 and 1980, and continue to steadily decline.

* Forty percent of all U.S. Latinos watched the 1995 Super Bowl, while 70 percent watched the 1994 World Cup Final.

* About one-third of America's college students don't watch television at all, and 55 percent watch less than 1.5 hours a day.

* Black adults aged 24 and younger are three times more likely to buy a pager than the average U.S. adult.

* Though obvious in their dissimilarities, these groups are all veterans of the marketing wars. As a result, they display a remarkable discernment about marketing and share an aversion to being lumped together, condescended to or manipulated by businesses.

"Consumers are infinitely wiser about the ways of marketing than they used to be," says Goldstein. "We're talking to a more mature audience, people who know more of what they want and what they're looking for. With the avalanche of information available to consumers, they can scrutinize their purchases more actively than they used to. And they're better able to separate the reality from the fantasy."