A woman I worked with had spent twenty two years in supply chain leadership. By the time we met, she’d already built everything except the part that helps people recognise themselves. There was a website, a logo and a tagline about “empowering professionals through their next chapter.”
I asked her who it was for.
“Anyone going through a career transition,” she said.
I asked her to picture one person. Not a type. A person.
She started three answers before she landed on one that made her stop hedging: a woman around fifty, still senior, still respected, who had just been quietly passed over for a role she was better qualified for than the person who got it. Not devastated. Just tired of being underestimated in rooms she used to run.
Once she had that woman in the room instead of a “target market,” the sentence describing her own work took ninety seconds to write. It had taken her six months to write “empowering professionals through their next chapter”, and it still didn’t sound like her.
That’s the part almost everyone skips, and it’s not a comprehension problem. Not because they don’t care who they help. Because choosing one person feels like excluding everyone else. “Everyone” just feels safer to write than “one specific woman I might be wrong about.”
Safer, and slower, quieter, and considerably more expensive.
After enough conversations like this, a pattern becomes difficult to ignore: the vaguer the audience, the vaguer the offer, the vaguer the price, and the vaguer the results.
Specificity isn’t a marketing technique. It’s a thinking discipline. It’s the thing that makes every decision after it easier, including decisions that have nothing to do with marketing at all.
I ask three questions to get there:
1. Who is this one person, specifically, not a category?
2. What is she actually living through right now, not what she says she wants?
3. What does she become, on the other side of working with you?
Answer those questions and the positioning sentence writes itself: I help [that one person] go from [where she actually is] to [where she actually wants to be]. Not clever. True.
My client’s version of that sentence changed nothing about who she actually helps. It only removed the fog around it. Within a week, three people from her own network read it and recognised themselves immediately, in a way a tagline about empowerment never managed in six months.
You don’t need a bigger audience. You need one person, specifically imagined, standing in the room while you write.
That’s exactly what the second part of The Second Act Blueprint is designed to help you do. Not who you serve in general. Recognise the one person you serve in particular.
Talk soon,
Pia
Who was the one person in your mind while you were reading this?
I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
“Because choosing one person feels like excluding everyone else.”
So so true. I grappled with this one for a long time. Still do, because of course I too want to be inclusive. But I’ve learned speaking to all is like speaking to no one.
Thanks for the reminder.