Unfortunately they are not, in general, especially gifted at understanding people unlike themselves.
Not only does that explain why so much marketing isn’t aimed at the people most likely to buy the brand, it also explains the recurrent urge to “premiumize” brands.
Not every move upmarket is strategic insight. Sometimes, it is just marketers building for people more like themselves.
I once saw an agency label a segment of older, lower-income whisky and gin consumers “the elderly and defeated.”
That is not segmentation. That is social snobbery pretending to be strategic insight.
And besides being offensive, it told you everything about the mindset behind it.
Bud Light and Jaguar are obvious examples of what happens when brands start expressing codes that make more sense to the people managing them than to the people buying them.
But quieter versions of the same mistake happen every day, in less visible categories, with less press coverage and just as much damage.
The brand is not you. The target is not the audience you instinctively understand best, or the one you feel most naturally at ease with. It is the one most likely to buy profitably, and to keep the business alive.
An under-index becomes a recommendation, when it should just be an observation
This type of reasoning feels very analytical until you think about it for more than thirty seconds.
A team notices that the brand under-indexes with some group and immediately concludes that this group must be the next growth opportunity.
By that logic, the U.K. would automatically be a high-potential market for solar panels simply because penetration is lower than in Spain or Italy.
But every brand under-indexes somewhere, and this is not how opportunity analysis works.
On its own, relative weakness proves almost nothing.
The real question is where the profitable upside really sits.
Is the group large enough to matter? Can it be reached and converted efficiently? And once converted, is it genuinely valuable?
In the end, most targeting mistakes are driven less by consumer reality than by marketers projecting their own tastes, anxieties, and social preferences onto the market, then occasionally reinforcing them with some remarkably faulty logic.
That would be harmless if targeting were a minor decision. But targeting is one of the most important choices a brand can make, and one of the easiest ways to hurt a brand when done badly.
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