Who’s your audience?

And are you taking all of them into consideration?

When thinking about who they want to reach and speak to, brands often think of their audience in terms of their current and prospective customers: people who are either buying a brand’s products or using its services or will so in the future.

But at any given time, a brand has a much wider and more complex audience of cultural observers, fans, customers, commentators and collaborators. It needs to build a relationship with all of them:

Observers: A brand reaches observers when it does something that the wider culture pays attention to. Observers are usually reached when a mass brand does a collaboration (e.g. Dunkin x everyone, McDonalds x Travis Scott, Ikea x Byredo, and countless other collabs). In addition to collaborations, observers are also reached through working with celebrities, cultural micro-actions, like a revival of a brand’s archives, a brand refresh (e.g. Brooks Brothers) or an anniversary event (e.g. Ralph Lauren’s 50th and Michael Kors 40th anniversary). If a brand manages to tap into observers’ specific cultural obsession (vintage, affinity towards celebrities), they may become fans and customers. To keep them interested, however, a brand needs to keep constantly feeding the Observer’s cultural interest. This is an unlikely scenario. Still, the main benefit of observers is to widely…