Customer-First Marketing: How Generalization Can Lead to Stereotyping

(and How We Can Do Better)

They try to say I’m a typical cat, but honey they have me pegged all wrong!

Dear Diary,

This week was a fun one. We’re still on a quest to find a camera for our PoC development (RIP arduino kit), but we also had to prepare for AUVSI Xponential! This year’s lineup is very centered around AI in the UAV (uncrewed aerial vehicle) space and my cofounder is ready to roam the floors spreading knowledge about our startup Aequa. In prep for this week’s conference, we really needed to get some materials together that explained our startup enough to spark interest. Now our materials are far from perfect and will undergo many revisions, but we were able to create:

📃 one pager with a summary, four key value propositions, and contact information

🧑‍💻 flier inviting people to sign up for data collection volunteering

📸 a logo for the company (temporary until we decide on a final one)

⚾ a 30-second elevator pitch explaining what we’re all about

📧 email addresses with the company domain

Designing all of these items was a great exercise in practicing how we want to talk about our company. One barrier we’ve been facing is finding an answer we’re satisfied with for the question “what do you do?”. In crafting an elevator pitch, a one page flier, a logo, and a data collection invitation, we had ample practice in learning how to simplify and generalize our message. The bright side to this: this was easier to put together now compared to when we tried doing this for the first time three months ago. And as it was easier now, I’m sure it will be easier the next time we go about writing these materials again.

One logo idea we came up with. What do you see? What does it make you think of?

Generalizability is an interesting concept. We want something to be so clear it makes sense to everyone and yet so complex that it captures the most important details. Yet in the process, we learn how one statement can be interpreted in multiple ways. We try our best to craft something effective, but at the end of the day we end up optimizing for the crowds that yield the greatest reward. In a way, we behave just like a machine learning model does. When we’re given the data we have, we try to generalize it as best we can, but at some point we can easily lean toward overfitting for optimal yield.

In week 3 of the accelerator program, speaker Jill Nelson talked with us about the importance of knowing the types of people in your community. Through her case study with Ruby as well as her exercises, she gave us a guide to figuring out how to generalize the different types of people we will interact with in our business. Highlighting that no one pitch can strike all personas effectively, she advocated for finding your top personas and crafting your message toward each.

Her logic summarized:

You need to know who your customers are. But your product and services drive who that actually is. So if you start with one, you need to figure out the other.

So if you have your product or service, you need to figure out who your customers are. And once you identify who they may be, you need to consider what drives them. There are four areas to consider when thinking about what drives a particular persona:

👻 What are their fears?
🦸 What are their ambitions?
😖 What are their frustrations?
🍬 What are their wants and needs?

The first two are future-looking: what do they hope for and what are they weary of. The latter two are in the present: what currently is bothersome and what are they looking for? If you can step into their shoes and answer these four questions, you are much closer to understanding what they would be looking for in a product or service that is pitched to them directly. By identifying their needs, frustrations, fears, and ambitions, you can directly give them solutions to solve some of their biggest hurdles. And if you do this using their rhetoric, it will turn those people into loyal customers.

Now a few things about this stood out to me. First, when we were in the lecture and having time for discussions and activities, I learned that many people in that room had not been thinking about this at this level. When we did exercises to write down this information about our current client personas, many founders struggled. At first, I thought it was interesting that the majority fell into this category. But upon reflection, it actually fed directly into the second thing that stood out to me: 

This kind of marketing relies heavily on stereotyping. 

Fears, Dreams, Frustrations, and Desires - these alone aren’t forming stereotypes as much as they are generalizing the population. However, our homework (and breakout sessions) had us go beyond this. In addition, we also needed to identify their:

• Interests

• Influences

• Typical Profile (name, age, gender, location, occupation, income, photo) 😖

As someone with significant experience in community building and the DEIBA space, this type of profiling for the sake of marketing feels like we’re taking steps backward instead of forward. When marketing focuses on targeting the majority, it makes it even more difficult for underrepresented groups to change the space. And if marketing intentionally doesn’t target the majority, it feels strategic, making it harder to define how the space can and will look in the future.

So if understanding customers is important and effective, what is a better way of going about this? From my experience, the greatest success always happens when you listen to your community, start the conversations yet to be had, and immerse yourself in the interactions that follow. What that means to me is that you still learn and investigate their fears, ambitions, frustrations, and desires as well as their interests and influences. However, you strive to never get a profile. In my opinion, if you can easily come up with a typical profile, then you haven’t diversified your scope enough. And if there truly isn’t enough of a diverse scope yet to interview, then your persona needs to widen. Diversity of experience, thought, preference, and lifestyle matters in every aspect of your business and your life. For the same reasons why no one person will hear your elevator pitch in the same way, no one person should be pegged for your marketing campaigns. 

Remember how I previously said we need to question everything and make choices that radically change the landscape for the better? Well, I think this is one place to start. Otherwise, we end up with quotes like this:

“As a woman, I’ve always known owning a business was possible. However, to me, it was always pitched as owning a storefront, selling goods or services, and typically showcased some kind of career that was balanced or predominately female (like running a bakery). Running something like a tech startup was never on the table. I knew it was possible because people before me have found themselves in that position. But outside of leveling up, I had no idea how to eventually get there. So today, I am reminded just how much information matters - from the actual facts to the way they are presented.”

Let’s focus marketing efforts on generalizing a landscape that can change rather than one that looks and feels the way it does today. Onward and upward! 🚀

Leila Kaneda
Co-Founder and CTO
she/her/hers