Who are you really reaching with your message

by Sabrina Parsons on September 28, 2007

I just posted on my personal blog, Mommy CEO, about marketing to women. There are some interesting questions that I bring up, and I wanted to cross post here at the Bplans.com blog.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in business planning is people who think that "everyone" is their target market. For example:

I am launching a shoe company. Everyone wears shoes, thus my target market is all 300 million people in the US.

OK, come on. Who are you kidding? Your shoes are probably built for a certain TYPE of person. Figure that out, and then tell me who your target market is.

Read my post about this at Mommy CEO.

About Sabrina Parsons

Sabrina has served as CEO of Palo Alto Software since 2007. She and her husband, Noah, founded a UK software distribution company in 2001 that later was purchased by and became a wholly owned subsidiary of Palo Alto Software. Sabrina is a successful Internet expert, having served as Director of Online Marketing at Commtouch, Senior Producer at Epinions.com, and founder of her own Web consulting company, Lighting Out. She is a graduate of Princeton University. Sabrina masquerades as MommyCEO (www.mommyceo.org), where she writes a blog about running a business and balancing that with life with her husband and three young sons. When Sabrina is not at work she can be found chasing her kids all over Oregon: biking, hiking, swimming, skiing, and anything outdoors that uses up a lot of little boys' energy.