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The Conceptual Target

The conceptual target is a community of individuals bound by a common hidden agenda, with implications for what’s really important to them and for how you invite them to follow you.

Why do some messages connect with an audience and others fail? Can it be as simple as this? “I like what I hear” or “It is as if the message was meant for me.” The reason for this resonance is that the message connects with a hidden agenda of the community. Igniting your following through the power of the hidden agenda is best when you can develop a definition that stands as a universally held understanding of who your followers are and what is dear to them. More importantly, it crystallizes for you the hidden agenda that you must connect with in everything you say and do.

The conceptual target rests on the key principle that target audiences are not numbers, or age groupings, or functional descriptions. Nor are they laundry lists of characteristics. A conceptual target is simply a community of individuals who share common human truths. It is a highly evocative and stirring articulation of what these people are about, with enormous implications for what attracts them and how you might expect them to behave. One of my favorite conceptual targets, which arises out of the political arena, is the “soccer mom.” The huge audience of women denoted by the term soccer mom is widely varied in where they live, how much they earn, and their lifestyles, but they are bound together by a sentiment that lies in their hearts. I have a conceptual target of people I call “growth aspirants.” These are adventurers, spirited and forward-looking people who aspire to create something where nothing existed before.

Conceptual targeting is highly effective because it is based upon the principle that creating a following is a human endeavor, rooted not in facts and figures but in emotions, desires, and beliefs. This vital step provides a window on the “community” you seek to reach and on how you can connect with them. So, then, a critical component of creating a following is an inspired articulation of the conceptual target. My grasp of this concept was laid down very early in my career.

It’s All About the Who

One of the many benefits of my years in the advertising business was the chance to meet dozens of extraordinary people. Undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable, confounding, and, at the same time, lovable people was Hank Seiden. Few were more certain of their convictions, or more unwavering in their beliefs about how to sell, than Hank. The agency he owned, a company called Hicks & Greist, merged with the New York office of Ketchum Advertising, and he became its leader. It is there we met.

Hank was a formidable character. A no-nonsense former creative director from the days when they threw T squares at account guys, Hank did not suffer fools. He could be brusque and dismissive, but also had a heart of gold. He had a big soft spot for me, and always gave me time, no matter what the circumstances. Hank was also, without a doubt, one of the funniest people I have ever worked with. As he was holding forth in his office one afternoon, reminding me for the thousandth time about the discipline and orderliness required to create an ad, the door of his office swung open and an elegant woman entered the room. She was simply radiant. “Good afternoon, young man,” she greeted me. “Henry, I’m off to Bloomingdale’s and then to meet Rachel. Don’t forget we’re meeting at 7:30 at the Abelow’s. Now, don’t be late.” With a charming smile, she turned and left as swiftly and as regally as she had arrived. Now, I’d never heard anybody refer to the formidable Hank Seiden as Henry. Looking sheepish, shrugging his shoulders, and in a perfect Jackie Mason accent, Hank remarked, “You know … I believe in reincarnation, do you know why?” Taking the bait, of course, I asked why. He replied, “Because I’m coming back as Mrs. Henry Seiden!”

While he was one of the most amusing people in the business, Hank was also one of its wisest. “In business,” he used to say, “you don’t earn a nickel, you earn five pennies.” He knew marketing was all about an idea, and there were no shortcuts to getting it. Only hard work, focus, and discipline would do. Hank wrote a book on the business called Advertising Pure and Simple. He believed that success was achieved through the basics, the who, what, and how, always in that order. He never wavered, gave in to fads, took shortcuts, or listened to anyone or anything that diverted him from the grit of creating a great pitch for us or for our clients. I think he went to the same school as Enid Merin, our door-to-door encyclopedia salesperson.

Hank believed things went wrong when people moved immediately to the how, that is, to the execution or the technique. He said, disdainfully, that it was because the how was the easy and fun part. He believed that these shortcut efforts always end in tears because they fail to do the very hard work that is necessary to understand intimately the individuals you are targeting, the who. Only after exhaustively turning over every potential bit of understanding of the target and arriving at a rich articulation of who these people are do you have permission to move to the what and the how. Great thinking, from a great man.

Creating a Following

I’ve read just about every Winston Churchill biography you can lay your hands on. I am sure many of you can remember one of this great statesman’s most famous lines:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …”

I recall reading that when Churchill wrote his speech, he remarked that he was not imposing this idea upon the British people but rather articulating something that they all felt collectively in their hearts. All he was doing was crystallizing and sharing a declaration they already believed. He effectively created a following by igniting a feeling held in the hearts of the British people.

Creating a following is not “imposition.” It is what I call “buoyancy.” Buoyancy is a phenomenon whereby, as a leader of a following, you “float,” because the people in the community you have inspired believe that you should. They believe in you, support you, celebrate your strengths, and shore up your weaknesses, all because you understand and connect with what lies in their hearts. Creating a following is rooted in a fundamental understanding of your audience’s collective hidden agenda and in an ability to crystallize that agenda into a common definition that binds them as one.

Creating a following is somewhat more complex than pitching to a small group of five or six. By definition, the larger the group of people, the higher the likelihood that they will differ widely by age and income or in functional ways of describing and targeting them. A brilliant way to describe a large audience (your following) as a common community rooted in a collective hidden agenda that you can ignite, can be found in what is called a conceptual target.

The Evolution of Targeting

Careful targeting has always been a mainstay in the marketing and advertising fields, and in the political arena as well. Many of us in marketing learned about the notion of the “target audience,” the group to whom we would direct our marketing efforts. It was invariably defined in functional terms and usually by demographic, for example, males aged twenty-five to fifty-four, teens from sixteen to eighteen, women thirty-five to fifty-four, and so on. This clear delineation drove all we did, from shaping the messaging to executing it to delivering it via different media. With an ever-increasing competitive environment pressuring marketers and agencies alike, new methods of understanding target audiences developed. The target audience description would be given an additional layer of information, called psychographics. This additional dimension, which aimed to understand the psychological nature common to the group, would be added to the demographic description, in a list format. Looking back, target audience descriptions were generally fairly lengthy and filled with bits and pieces of information. Not a process that inspires. Nor was it one that lent itself to creating a larger aggregate. The functional differences among the individuals was simply too vast for there to be a meaningful common ground.

The Origins of Conceptual Targeting

The origins of pinpointing with clarity and intensity the emotions and deeply held desires of a community of like-minded people can be found in politics of the latter twentieth century. In the spring of 1979, a man by the name of Joe Plummer put forward to his colleague Richard Wirthlin, a renowned pollster, the idea that a very different strategic method could help a former actor-turned-governor become president. I first met Joe, a bighearted and gregarious man, at McCann. He was a senior strategic planner working on multinational accounts like Nestlé and Coca-Cola. He is now a professor of global marketing at Columbia University. An optimist with a booming voice that could knock you across the room, Joe played a role in two of the most important American political campaigns in recent memory, but his humble manner is such that one literally has to drag his enormous contributions out of him. I managed to do so.

Joe was invited to help create political strategy for Ronald Reagan, then a successful governor but a somewhat dubious presidential candidate. The political polling process took its usual turn, identifying all of the traditional voter segments that would be needed to secure a win. Vitally important but disparate demographics included large portions of the white male voting bloc, among them older Southern, urban working-class, and suburban conservative voters. On the face of it, the disparate demographic descriptions made it difficult to find any ground for common campaign appeal. Joe directed the people undertaking the polling to come back with attitudinal elements that were common to these groups. He said, “I thought that there must be some kind of emotional sentiment all these men had in their hearts that irrespective of where they lived, what they did, or even how they previously voted, could be uncovered and leveraged in campaign communication.” Joe theorized that a mass constituency made up of disparate parts could be held together by a deeply held emotional sentiment, a conceptual target.

When the results came in, two key things emerged. The first was the profound sense of alienation among all of these men. They felt that no one was paying attention. Joe commented, “It was as if their voice and their contributions simply didn’t count anymore.” The second thing they had in common was a feeling that the country, once a great and powerful nation, had become weak and had lost its sway to other powers in the world, financially to the Japanese and militarily to the Soviet Union.

Joe crystallized the conceptual target as “angry white guys.” This galvanized the thinking of the campaign, linking these men together as a “community” with a common value system and set of concerns, all of which he realized could be tied to the strengths of Ronald Reagan and his perceived abilities as a leader. The confident tone struck by the resulting campaign of making America strong again resonated among this conceptual target. The campaign, which included a now-famous television commercial, “Morning in America,” was an uplifting story of what America could become, which resonated at the core of how the conceptual target felt and what they longed for. They voted overwhelmingly for a former actor to become the fortieth president of the United States.

Soccer Moms

Joe’s strategic abilities would be drawn on once again, this time on the opposite side of the political spectrum, to assist Bill Clinton’s campaign for the presidency. This time it was not men but women who were the subject of the debate. In a similar way, the disparate demography gave way to a powerfully insightful observation about women with children, whether they lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, or Duluth, Minnesota.

Many of America’s women were leading hectic lives, shuttling the kids to school, athletic activities, and a host of after-school pursuits while maintaining a household, and often working outside the home as well. Their huge struggle, by any standard, was set against the backdrop of an economy in shambles and record-breaking deficits that made it seem to these women that no matter how hard they tried, they were going backward. To these women, it seemed as if they struggled alone, with an unsympathetic government mortgaging the country’s future. Their biggest concern, though, was not their own plight but their belief that, for the first time in recent memory, their children’s lives would not be better than theirs, and in fact they would likely be worse. The now-famous conceptual target of “soccer moms” became a powerful label for this group of important voters. Bill Clinton’s message resonated with individuals who felt that they were alone in their struggle. Clinton’s identity as the “Boy from Hope” offered these women and others in the country a sense that he, through his empathy and youthful vigor, could dismantle old-style politics and embrace the newly emerging technological revolution to their benefit and to the benefit of their children. Soccer moms made a disproportionate contribution in securing Bill Clinton’s place as the forty-second president of the United States.

From my perspective, the power of Joe and his colleagues’ work in defining the notion of conceptual targeting was that they were able to ladder to a single emotional mindset among a demographically disparate group of people. They were able to craft a single emotional definition that could be tapped to create a following. It was a remarkable accomplishment from an even more remarkable fellow, my good friend Joe.

Today’s Relevance

What Joe and his colleagues pioneered was a means of defining a community of individuals who share an emotional like-mindedness. The urge to congregate with like-minded people is ageless. Abraham Maslow, an American professor of psychology, told us that after the vital needs of shelter and sustenance were provided for, a human being’s next most important need was to belong. This is the fundamental human desire to have relationships, to be understood and accepted. It is the emotional security that is found in being appreciated and wanted, in loving and being loved.

We have observed how, over millennia, humans have evolved and survived by banding together. Long ago they came together as tribes. These affinity groups were bound together in a bid for survival, survival against every known threat, including the elements, animals, and other tribes. People’s survival depended on collective action and unity, expressed through a shared value system, a set of deeply held beliefs, practices, customs, and aspirations.

These values were ultimately made iconic, expressed in symbols such as tartans, coats of arms, and indeed the flags of nations. Kings have come and gone, and so have empires and dynasties, but the desire and need to express a collective set of closely held values has endured. I like to call them citizenships. But something dramatic has happened: the ultimate democratization. Thanks to the power of today’s digital technology, these citizenships have taken on a new quality. They are now vast and borderless, united by common value systems and shared beliefs but untethered by geography. Reaching these citizenships, and creating a following among them, requires understanding the hidden agenda they hold in common, the collective desire they share, however far-flung or varied in composition the individuals may be. A common emotional desire will bind them together and, if you connect to it, will bind them to you.

Okay, Here’s How …

With all that you know about the individuals in your audience and their hidden agendas, get creative. What kind of emotional label can you create that telegraphs in a second how these individuals are connected? The best conceptual target descriptors are those that can be summarized in no more than three words. For example, when determining the conceptual target for an over-the-counter medication marketer, our advertising team discovered that the individual in the household most concerned with family health issues was the mother. For us, she was the “chief medical officer.” As women increasingly took roles outside the home in the business world, they delegated many of their tasks to others, but the one role they universally felt could never be compromised or relinquished was seeing to the health of each and every member of the family.

For one of our private banking clients whose targets were entrepreneurial businesspeople, we coined a conceptual target called the “self-made visionary.” Nothing was given to these individuals; they started at the bottom with nothing more than their ambitions and their wits. No silver spoon in the mouth for these people. They were self-made successes with the vision to see possibilities and the guts to make them happen.

When writing a conceptual target definition, you are not creating a technical descriptor. What you are writing is by definition a creative expression, an idea that encapsulates the target in emotional terms. It is value system-based, which is why it can contain so many disparate functional groups as part of its community. Here are some questions to consider when writing a conceptual target:

And when you arrive at a conceptual target description, ask yourself:

The following sections illustrate a few of my favorite examples of strong conceptual target descriptions.

Marriott: The Road Warrior

When we pitched for the Marriott International business (I’ll give you the whole story shortly), we had stacks of information on the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the Marriott Hotel audience. The real task was to articulate a highly evocative conceptual target that would reflect the spirit of the many thousands of individuals who stayed at Marriott hotels around the country and indeed across the world. It was very common at the time, and perhaps it is even today, when thinking about business targets, to describe them in stratospheric terms. Captains of industry, people at the seat of power, and achievers all conjure up imagery of private jets, boardrooms, and corridors of power.

The work of the team showed a very different picture. The vast mosaic of individuals traveling relentlessly from appointment to appointment were genuine, hard-working individuals who, oftentimes unnoticed, spent many days away from their homes and families, giving themselves for the benefit of their companies. This honorable bedrock of the business world, whether junior salespeople or CEOs, were all out there “selling,” and all shared a noble value system. They were honorable people doing honorable work, selling and winning for the people who matter most: their companies and their families.

The hidden agenda of Marriott guests captured the spirit of people willing to endure sacrifices to succeed:

“We want to succeed for our families and companies and will not give up in doing so.”

We called the conceptual target for these exceptional folks “road warriors.” As a means of bringing life to this conceptual target description, Peter Kim, our vice-chairman, paused in presenting his careful description of these folks, produced a book of plays, and described the soul of the “road warrior” by reading:

Nobody dast blame this man … Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to life. He don’t put a nut to a bolt. He don’t tell you the law or medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue riding on a smile and a shoeshine.

Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller

Fabulous.

MasterCard: Good Revolvers

The most difficult enemy in the MasterCard pitch was not any of the twenty agencies we were up against, it was the excruciating forces of parity. In a way, that was the magic. The key to success would be found not in a statistic or a fact or in some sort of superiority claim but in human insight. We struggled with many things in developing the MasterCard pitch, the first being an understanding of the community that comprised the MasterCard target audience. Finding some difference between the audience demographics of Visa and MasterCard was virtually impossible. The audiences were just too similar.

In the course of studying the problem, the strategic trinity of Eric Einhorn, Suresh Nair, and Nat Puccio arrived at a breakthrough definition based upon emotional commonalities among card users, most importantly identifying those qualities that resonated with the DNA of the MasterCard brand. Common to all these individuals, irrespective of demographics, was a hidden agenda of wanting to provide the very best for the people that they loved. This insight was made even more powerful as a consequence of a profound shift in societal values toward those that were more inner-directed. The further magic was that all of this connected to the very essence of the MasterCard brand. The conceptual target of people “buying good things, for good reasons, for good people” was called the “good revolver” (a “revolver,” in credit card parlance, is a person who does not pay the balance in full but does so in monthly installments). As our ad team spoke with literally dozens of credit card holders, it became clear that, while they “revolved” or rolled over a balance, all felt the same way. Their purchases were made for good reasons, for the people they loved. As my mother, clearly one of these people, pointed out when asked how she single-handedly managed to raise a house full of children with all the challenges life threw at her, replied, “Well, lots of hard work, perseverance, patience, a bit of luck, and my credit cards!” With the strategic work to identify the target done, we looked back to put it in hidden agenda terms, uncovering what was in the heart of the MasterCard conceptual target:

The hidden agenda: We’re not reckless free spenders, we just want a good life for the people we care about.

One very early morning, with but a few weeks left until the pitch, my friend and a brilliant Creative Director named Jonathan Cranin rang me, and our conversation went something like this:

“I think I’ve got something.”

“OK, I’ll be right down.”

“Ah, let’s do it later. Never mind.”

“You’re killing me, I’m coming down.”

I entered his office, and there, on the white screen on his computer was a simple line.

There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else there’s MasterCard.

“Oh, my God, we’ve won the business!”

Within a few days, this inspirational thought was shared with several people, including a gifted creative team, Joyce King Thomas and Jeroen Bours. Their objective: create a campaign idea from Jonathan’s seminal thought. Very soon thereafter, we met to see what had developed. In her own gentle yet riveting style, Joyce explained that there were things in life you simply could not put a price on and presented an idea the world now knows as Priceless. The win, and the global following it created, came because our clients and their customers alike were enchanted by a simple yet fundamental human truth held among a community of like-minded people who were ignited by our commitment to them and their aspirations.

At the core of this humble brand was a conceptual target of individuals who had like values and a shared ambition, who agreed that MasterCard stood for more than the purchases it afforded. It was this image that stood at the heart of the hidden agenda for the MasterCard brand. In short: good people buying good things for good reasons. We called our conceptual target—generous, hard-working, and thoughtful people—“good revolvers,” and these were the people who would embrace the little piece of plastic as theirs because it reflected their own deeply held values.

Ericsson: Everyday Heroes

Recently, one of my clients was invited to contend for the worldwide communications business of the technology giant Ericsson. Looking closely at the company, we were awed by the huge global presence literally wiring up the planet in some hundred and fifty countries. My client, meeting with me after the briefing, was struck by how different the company was from what they had been expecting. They went in expecting highly analytical, task-oriented people, the type you might find in a global technology company, doing the heavy lifting of wiring up the world. Instead, they found warm, engaging people who spoke more about Ericsson’s role in the world than its technological prowess. After the briefing meeting came the exhaustive research on what the company actually does. Buried in a little internal brochure was a sort of company mission. It said that the people of Ericsson were in virtually every country in the world, from major metropolitan centers to remote places where nearly no one goes. The company, it went on, was doing “important work to better people’s lives around the world.” The team could sense, however, that the people at Ericsson felt that this vital work of building communications infrastructure was, while maybe not so glamorous, absolutely essential to human development, though their efforts were going unnoticed. The hidden agenda:

We want to be appropriately recognized for making a difference in the lives of people around the world because of what our business does.

That was it. It was now clear that Ericsson could step out of the shadows and share its collective pride for the important work it was doing to help communities prosper. Ericsson’s conceptual target: “the everyday hero.”

I left the group to develop the presentation, returning some weeks later, about five days before the pitch. I entered their “war room,” with its walls papered with charts, graphs, and white sheets with lots of scribbling; on individual white cards tacked on the wall were six key concepts. Among them was a simple idea: “Creating Everyday Miracles.” I turned to the group and reminded them of the conceptual target we’d established. It was clear. This was the unmistakable recommendation, and my client won the business unanimously.

This shows not only how useful the conceptual target can be in defining a community of followers but also demonstrates its value as a screening criterion for judging the means by which you will connect with your target. Without this conceptual target framework, what would be the criteria for selecting among the six different concepts created to connect with Ericsson’s internal and external followers? Based upon the written technical brief, it’s likely that the “Everyday Miracles” concept would not have been chosen, and a less-than-optimal connection with internal and external Ericsson followers would have been made. It was also evidence that a conceptual target isn’t ethereal, but a galvanizing idea that gives purpose to the process of connecting with your following.

And Now …

With the hidden agenda now defined and its larger constituency tool, the conceptual target, identified, the question now is, How do you uncover the hidden agenda? How do you find it even if you can’t meet your audience face to face? How do you uncover the unspoken, visceral, emotional desire that lies in their hearts? Elementary, my dear readers …