CASE STUDY:
Beginning with Your Customer to Envision Promotion Materials

I have been working on ideas for a side business designing and making handmade goods with vintage and recycled materials. This exercise helped me refine my idea of who my market might be, which will help me design collateral such as tags, a website, and business cards. The process of searching through magazines and vintage materials for images to represent my customer helped me refine my ideas about who that person is and what sets my potential customer apart.

At first I was just collecting images (of interiors, objects, etc.) that appealed to me, but if I couldn’t justify how an image represented my customer, I had to set it aside. The themes that emerged were handwork, do-it-yourself, vintage, ecology, nature, and humor. My customers are Internet users, but they also spend time thrifting, crafting, and seeking out people with common interests. They tend to use the Internet to build relationships (which often become real-world relationships). They may be explicitly environmentalists, or they may simply value handmade goods and the style of vintage goods and lean toward simplicity and away from consumerism. They like real mail as well as email. And they have a sense of humor and whimsy.

—Ellen Rooney