Let’s Play… “How Well Do You Know Your Target Market”

The last thing I should be doing in the middle of the week before a holiday is watching videos online. That said, I had to see the world premier of the new Land Rover LRX…er…Evoque.  Whatever the hell they want to call it, I had to see it. There was a big ceremony, live video feed and then the interview with Land Rover managing director, Phil Popham. When the guest host asked him about who the Evoque is made for, he blathered something like ..blah blah totally new audience blah blah…

Flash back just 6 weeks and I can envision the product manager for the now soon-to-be-in-the-crapper Kin phone (after just 48 days!).  Yep, you heard it.  Microsoft and Verizon are closing this little project down and moving all of the engineers over to the Windows 7 phone project.  Which, all things considered, is probably a good idea.  However, this is, as Andrew Hampp and Rupal Parekh of AdAge put it, likely one of the quickest birth-to-death products, with so much publicity surrounding it no less, in modern mobile phone times.

In what may be one of the fastest launch-to-failure paths ever taken by a major marketer, Microsoft’s Kin, the company’s first phone product, is being discontinued just six weeks after its May 13 launch. As first reported by Gizmodo, the phone’s marketing and product development teams are being shifted to work on the launch of the Windows Phone 7.

I can’t help but draw some similarities in the vagaries of the language on both the part of Land Rover and Microsoft regarding their respective new products.  Granted, I realize that they’re both really freaking smart companies.  In fact, MS hit up over 50,000 teens and tweens for their opinion, according to sources cited in the aforementioned article.  Yet, they still did stupid stuff like affording the Kin no ability to download apps, share media via Twitter, schedule events on a calendar or use GPS. Brilliant.  I’m sure that Land Rover did research, focus groups and went through hours of design to come up with the Evoque, but I’m nonetheless disturbed by the vague response alluding to an alleged target market that this new aged (in my opinion, furthest thing from a f-ing Land Rover/Range Rover ever conceived) vehicle that is supposedly going to appeal to so many different people than the typical LR crowd.

“Customers can be confident that the new car will be premium, luxurious and just as special as the other Range Rover models. Its sporting looks and unique qualities will open the brand to a new group of customers who may not have considered a Range Rover product before.”

The moral of the story here is this: How well, no, really, how well do you know the (your) target market? How well do you understand who you serve? Have you gone beyond the demographics and explored the psychographics and ethnography of your audience to really understand if what you’re spending your hard-won R&D and marketing dollars on is really going to hit the bull’s-eye that you’ve painted on the backs of your unsuspecting consumers? 

Before you launch your next great masterpiece…ponder that.