3 Targeting Mistakes That Drive Me Crazy

After over 25 years in marketing, I learned that many targeting decisions aren’t driven by sound commercial logic.

They are driven by faulty logic, a lack of empathy, and the recurring fantasy that the consumer most attractive to marketers is automatically the most valuable one.

The same mistakes always come back, usually wrapped in a persuasive deck and introduced as “growth opportunities.” They are not. They’re just old errors in fresh packaging.

Here are the three biggest mistakes:

Being tyrannized by the youths

There is a sentence you always hear in marketing meetings, especially when the data suggests older consumers deserve more focus: “We need to recruit the next generation.” 

And if you push back, someone will often add the supposedly decisive line: “After all, people over 50 won’t be around forever.”

In reality, it is just a polished way of ignoring the people currently paying the bills to chase the ones we find more exciting.

In many categories, older consumers have more spending power, buy more often, and are cheaper to reach efficiently. They often are the commercial center of gravity, not some sleepy legacy segment sitting politely in the corner.

And yet teams still talk as if older consumers are drifting into irrelevance.

They get thrown into a lazy catch-all bucket, like “50+,” as if a 52-year-old, a 64-year-old, and a 72-year-old are the same consumer.

Meanwhile, younger consumers are sliced into ever finer categories: 18-24, 25-34, and so on, as if the difference between 24 and 25 is a major anthropological event.

This is all because of an old fantasy: “Win them young and keep them forever”.

But that idea has aged far worse than the consumers it dismisses. 

Today, churn is high, loyalty is brittle, and many rejuvenation efforts pull off the neat trick of irritating the current base without winning enough new buyers to compensate.

Marketers and agencies target people like themselves.

Targeting teams tend to drift toward people who feel familiar. In other words, they target people very much like themselves: urban, educated, connected, progressive, often with above-average buying power.

Meanwhile, the brand’s actual heavy buyers may be older, more mainstream, more suburban, less fashionable, or simply less enjoyable to imagine on a mood board.

Steve Harrison argues in Can’t Sell, Won’t Sell that it would not matter that marketers and agency people come from a narrow sociological profile, if they had unusually strong empathy.

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.