Comedians know this.
They know that failing to reach a room and convert them is failure. A bomb!
The best of them, those we know and hear about. Have for the most part developed techniques for reading and understanding the room.
Whilst it is advantageous that you know everyone in the room and their preferences and the nuances surrounding these, in order to reach them, or ensure your message resonates with them, it might be difficult to pull this off. Very difficult, if you do not have years and months to dedicate to this – note that the room changes and so does the people in it, including you.
So working with aggregates and averages come into play.
What are the needs of the people in this age group or that age group?
What is the prevailing practice in this or that industry?
These over simplified questions can be nuanced to entire markets, faith, geographies and all the other artificial or natural groupings of people, to help you get started selecting a slice of the room to target. That is segmenting.
And in knowing your audience, you can craft your story, your product or the experience you want to create for this selected audience. That is targeting.
There is no one size fits all. And there are no true averages – but we can always make do with aggregates.
