If you don’t understand people, you don’t understand business. (Period) It’s not about market segments, target markets, demographics, market research, trends, and every other terminology out there. 100% of your customers are people, 100% of clients are people, and 100% of employees are people. Simon Sinek expounds on this point in his talk

Revising the marketing framework

The modern marketing industry has divided and segmented people into concepts, and instead of marketing to people, instead we’re marketing to concepts. We’re marketing to the concept of a certain demographic, the concept of a certain target market and the people in these concepts are secondary or subsidiary factors.  For marketing, these methods of going about our business have made everything pretty easy, but also very hard.

It has made everything easy because once we take the time to flesh out and define the borders of these divisional concepts; we have fixed our aim on a simpler target and can continually pump our messages towards this target. Its not a bad idea and is in fact very good. Essentially we’ve built a system in which we’ve conceptually stuffed people into. The hard part is that the system we’ve built makes it hard to change our aim. You see, our targets are moving. We have these fixed systems in a fluid and dynamic landscape. People are moving around, converging, mixing, mingling, and talking. People are not static and our fixed conceptual models aren’t geared to manage the new dynamic landscape.

Marketing and people

In one way it is easier to market to a concept, an abstracted idea of what a group of people wants; though these mingling and mixing of peoples exposes the weaknesses inherent within the system. We need to market to people again! Simon Sinek hits this point on the head and I wasn’t so much amazed by his revelations, as I was moreso startled by the fundamental lesson of his talk. I was startled because I had forgotten myself, being caught up in demographics, target markets, and whatnot. Its people stupid!