Flicking through Bob Hoffman’s “101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising”, a collection of pieces mainly from his Ad Contrarian blog, I landed on a story he told about a visit to the DMV to get his driver’s licence renewed:
…I’m thinking of making a monthly visit to the DMV compulsory for staff. I want them to see what the people they’re making ads for really look like. To see the people they never see in the restaurants they go to. Never see at the bars they frequent. Never see in focus groups. And never hear from on Twitter.
Smart idea! A similar sentiment commonly advocated by wise sages in our game. Get out your bubble. We’re not creating ads, brands or marketing aimed at us. The target market is the man on the street. The ‘ordinary people’.
In principle, I agree. But there’s also a problem with this… where exactly do these ordinary people congregate for us to observe? Is it just at the DMV — because we don’t really have those in the UK? And how would we know when we see one? Do they wear a special t-shirt?
Stick ‘ordinary people’ on a recruitment brief for your next focus group, and see what response you get.
I’ll digress to a rather ham-fisted, cliche-laden comparison… Right across the road from our office is a Veggie Pret, which is always abuzz at lunchtime (or was, anyway). Many would, quite fairly, argue that an exclusively plant-based lunchtime eatery in Shoreditch is the exact opposite of vacating my metropolitan creative bubble. But on my visits there (the long stemmed broccoli box salad’s genuinely delicious!), I find the customer base much more demographically diverse than you might expect.
Then there’s the other end of the supposed spectrum — your classic greasy spoon. Pat’s Cafe, let’s call it. The stereotype would suggest Pat’s to be patron’d by high-vis clad construction workers drinking mugs of tea and chomping down on full English. A proper salt of the Earth breakfast crowd.
But I, and many like me (truly unskilled in any discernible trade), love a greasy spoon too! I have many (non-advertising) friends in well-paid, affluent jobs who are just as likely to frequent Pat’s, or a burger van in a car park, than an upmarket organic bistro that slaps avocado on everything. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of our small town, working class upbringing? Who knows?
One of the golden principles of brand growth, according to Byron Sharp, is to focus on market penetration. The majority of your customers will be infrequent purchasers — so cast your net wide and, within reason, don’t limit who you think your ‘typical’ customer is.
Taking that as read, maybe all the self-deprecation we inflict on ourselves is a bit of a fallacy? If we’re led to believe everyone that’s not ‘like us’ are the ordinary people, then we still end up thinking in polarised terms by grouping people in neat buckets.
Mark Pollard shared a Sweathead post on LinkedIn recently of Fergus Carroll’s 10 lessons from strategists on his On Strategy podcast; number 6 is:
Don’t forget the other 50% — you aren’t the customer. Visit other people’s lives.
We should absolutely challenge ourselves to take ourselves to see past our biases. But we shouldn’t let that come at the cost of questioning our own ‘ordinary-ness’. Of course don’t forget the other 50% who aren’t like you, but also don’t let that come at the cost of writing off those that are. The world is many shades of grey, and it’s a balancing act which takes patience, diligence and skill to recognise and understand.
Or, to return to my digression, there are lots of people who enjoy a greasy spoon for breakfast, and pop into a Veggie Pret for lunch (based on this sample of one). It’s not inconceivable.
We’re a complicated species, people. There really is no such thing as an ‘ordinary person’. So stop hunting the unicorn. Instead, embrace the rich tapestry of our differences — and work harder to uncover commonalities. They’re there if you work hard enough to look.
