Step 1. Define standard attributes: Demographics

- So step one is defining your standard customer attributes. And really what we're trying to get to here is who is your ideal customer? Who is the person that's going to buy from you? We want to start to describe that. We want to describe them in as much detail as we can. So please note that we have a worksheet that's going to walk you through this entire thing on our website, but because it is quite a long process, as we go through these different definitions, so not to worry, you can download that. But let's get started with defining our demographics and our psychographics. So when we look at demographics, we're going to look at age, gender, employment or career, marital status, sexual orientation, income, education, and geography. And under psychographics, we're going to take a look at values, lifestyles, beliefs or belief systems, attitude, interests and hobbies, health, personality, stage of life, opinions, and aspirations. These are all different attributes, I call 'em standard attributes, that you can look at as you work through your demographics and your psychographics. So our first attribute is gender. And gender's a pretty easy one, you're either male, female, or non-binary. And when you work with these, I typically suggest that you work within percentages. So you say percentage of male versus percentage of female. It might be 40% male, 60% female. Or if it's all male, you can define that. Or all female, you can define that as well. So males tend to care more about ease of purchase and product functionality, where females might care more about the relationship, or might care more about high-touch customer service. So when we look at male versus female, we can look at these attributes and start to infer different behaviors coming from them as it relates to our target market. So next is employment or career. And some of the definitions for that would be professional, blue-collar, skilled workers, freelancers, business owners, green-collar which is more around environmental, pink-collar which is more around service, no-collar which is considered artists. Another classification for employment could be out of work, full-time, or part-time. And what I recommend here is that you can pick more than one that qualifies for your target market. That's certainly okay to do. So you want to speak in terms of your target market's career path. So when you're talking to artists, you might use more flowery language. Where when you're talking to financial professionals, you might use more facts and figures, and that will resonate with your target market. So in our next attribute is marital status. So in marital status, you can either be married or single, divorced, remarried, or widowed perhaps. Now a couple of things to think about there is that a single person, if you start to think of a single person, they're going to be more hip, they're going to be more free spirited perhaps. Where your married person might be more inclined to be focused on family and time with family or time with spouse. And our next attribute is sexual orientation. This would include things like straight, gay, bi, lesbian, transgender, or even undefined. Now on this, like other attributes, don't feel compelled that you have to define this. If it doesn't apply to your target market, it's just irrelevant, then just leave this one out and go to the next one. Our next attribute is education. And so you want to ask, "How much education "has my target market had?" So they might have no high school at all, or even some high school, some college, they might be a college graduate. Perhaps they have an advanced degree or even a PhD. So you can ask all those different questions as it relates to education. Now education also infers some things in terms of the language that you use or the messaging that you use. In fact, you can use more sophisticated language for a higher educated individual, but a lower educated individual might actually be turned off by fancy or complex language. They might understand it, but they just might be turned off by it so you have to watch that. Education level also infers status in society, possibly even their income level, their affluencey, their social circles. So all of that starts to get communicated within education level as well. One last thing that I forget is you also want to look at the type of school or type of college they went to. They might have went to an Ivy League college. They might have went to a state college, perhaps a liberal arts college, or maybe even a trade school or a trade college or a junior college. All of those can mean something when you're defining their education level. The next attribute is geography. And this is the question that you want to ask here is where does your target market live and work? So a couple of things that we can look at are urban, suburban, rural, or metropolitan. Now another dimension of this could be actually even country, state, county, or city or town that they live in. You can define it on that dimension as well. And a third dimension that you could define is West Coast, Midwest, East Coast, Northerners, Southerners. All of those can actually work within defining geography. Now couple things to infer. The urban perhaps might value more convenience and time over price because typically, in the urban environments, in the metropolitan environments, they make more money. A rural customer might value family than an on-the-go lifestyle. So they might be more staying at home and value that more. Now what's interesting as well is you have to be careful about culture and language. So when you start to work in other countries that you have to understand the norms of those other countries, understand the culture of those other countries. For instance, the Indian culture which is becoming more and more Americanized, it takes a very different approach to how they communicate with one another or what they believe in terms of merchandising strategies or marketing strategies can be different than here in the US. So keep that in mind. A funny story about language is that in the early 1970s, Chevy came out with a car called the Chevy Nova, and they took it immediately to Latin America. There's only one problem, in Latin America Nova translates to, "Does not go." It's really hard to sell a car called the Chevy Does Not Go. It's not really popular. In fact, the funny thing is, it actually sold pretty well.