From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

Vision to values: Target audiences

From the course: Jeff Weiner on Leading like a CEO

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Vision to values: Target audiences

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- So from value propositions logically you need to think about who's going to be on the receiving end of the products and services that deliver on these value propositions. And some organizations, their target audience is seemingly everybody. This is a byproduct of technology that scales in completely unprecedented ways. You've got companies literally that measure their consumers in the billions with a B. We're talking about planetary scale. We used to talk about global scale in terms of this country and that county. Now you've got companies that are trying to reach every person on the planet that has access to these technologies. So a very unusual time to be in business. But target audiences, the more specific we can be with regard to who we're trying to create value for, the more likely we are to be able to execute upon that. So pretty straightforward definition. And these target audiences are also part of a prioritization exercise. So we know what our value propositions are. Who do we want to create value for, first and foremost? And that specificity enables us to figure out where we're going to allocate our marketing spend, where we're going to focus our R&D dollars, where we're going to focus on improvement. There's a whole host of things that flow from this. The key here is to understand who you're trying to create value for and not just assume it's everybody because when you're trying to be all things to all people it's going to be harder to focus, harder to prioritize, much harder to defend against competition that's going to do what? When you're trying to reach everyone what's your competition going to do? They're going to focus on a specific slice of that audience. Now there is something to be said about the scale I mentioned earlier, this idea of unprecedented scale. Some platforms do reach critical mass on a much bigger basis and that provides scale benefits, economies of scale and scale benefits. They can coexist with companies that try to become more niche-oriented and do a great job within one particular slice. But that's for each individual company to weigh in terms of how they're going to play that.

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