A segment you cannot reach separately is not a segment
If the same message reaches two groups through the same channel at the same cost, dividing them changes nothing operationally.
Market Core · Object
Audience
Everyone the organisation could serve, and who among them it actually addresses: how they divide into segments, what one of them is like up close, what each is worth, and where they can be found.
The term
What it is
The object is called Audience rather than Target Audience because it holds everyone the organisation could serve, not only the part a current campaign has been pointed at. Which segments are being targeted this year is a decision taken here and changed often; who exists in the market does not change when the plan does.
It reads downward. The audience divides into segments; a segment is described through the personas inside it; a persona is a recurring type, not a named individual. Keeping the two levels apart is what stops a segment turning into one imagined person, and one person turning into a whole market.
This object answers who and where. What they are trying to get done is settled in the Business Core under the value proposition, and keeping the two apart stops the audience work turning into a second, weaker version of the jobs analysis.
The most consequential output is the value per segment, because it determines where effort goes and is almost never calculated.
Why it earns a place
What goes wrong without it
Personas invented internally describe the organisation
A profile assembled in a workshop reflects who the team imagines. One assembled from interviews and records reflects who actually buys.
Segments differ in value by more than anyone expects
Acquisition cost, retention and spend all vary by segment, and the ranking by revenue is frequently the reverse of the ranking by contribution.
One level in
The modules within audience
Four working areas, and the first two nest. Segments divides the audience; Personas describes the recurring types found inside a segment; the third values them; the fourth establishes whether any of it can be reached.
Segment value
What each segment is worth: what they spend, what they cost to acquire, and how long they stay. The number that decides where effort goes.
LearnWhere they are
Where each segment can actually be reached, in what state of attention, and at what cost. The half of audience work that makes the rest usable.
Learn
Across the framework
What it touches
- Business CoreWhat the audience is trying to get done is analysed in the value proposition; this object settles who and where.
- Brand CorePositioning is aimed at a segment, and a position for everyone is aimed at nobody.
- Marketing ChannelsWhere the audience is determines which channels are even available.
- Customer JourneyWhere they are is a standing fact about them; the journey is a sequence they move through. If the sentence would still be true in a year when nobody buys anything, it belongs here.
- Data CoreSegment value requires the acquisition and retention data to be held at segment level.
Beyond the framework
Models worth knowing here
The Omnigoal says where this belongs and what it touches. It does not tell you how to think about it — other people have done that, and done it well. These are theirs.
Segmentation, targeting, positioning
Philip Kotler, building on Wendell R. Smith · 1956Divide the market, choose deliberately which parts to serve, then decide what you will mean to them.
The sequence is the argument. Segmentation without targeting produces a description of everybody; targeting without segmentation is a guess; and positioning decided before either is a slogan looking for an audience. Its enduring value is that it forces an explicit act of exclusion in the middle step.
- Reach for it when
- Whenever the answer to who the customer is comes back as anyone who needs it.
- Where it stops
- It assumes segments are stable and reachable as groups. Where behaviour varies more within a segment than between segments, the whole structure describes nothing.
Wendell R. Smith, “Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation”, Journal of Marketing, 1956; developed by Philip Kotler, Marketing Management, from 1967.
Personas
Alan Cooper · 1998A small number of specific, named, fictional people standing in for real patterns of behaviour.
Introduced in software design to stop teams building for an elastic user who conveniently wants whatever is easiest to build. The mechanism is specificity: a named person with a particular situation and a particular constraint cannot be quietly redefined mid-argument, and that is the entire benefit.
- Reach for it when
- When design or marketing decisions are being settled by whoever imagines the user most confidently.
- Where it stops
- Invented rather than researched, a persona is only a projection of the team, and demographic detail added for colour invites reasoning from stereotype.
Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams, 1998.
The buying centre
Frederick E. Webster Jr & Yoram Wind · 1972Also known as The decision making unit, DMU
An organisational purchase is made by a group of people holding different roles, not by a buyer.
It names the roles that appear in an organisational purchase — the user, the influencer, the buyer, the decider, the gatekeeper — and observes that they are held by different people with different concerns, frequently in different departments and sometimes in different companies. The practical consequence is that one argument cannot win the decision: the case that persuades the user is not the case that satisfies the approver, and the role most often unaddressed is the one that can stop it.
- Reach for it when
- Whenever a sale involves more than one person, and particularly where the person who uses the product has no budget and the person with budget will never use it.
- Where it stops
- The roles are a vocabulary rather than a map. Who holds which role varies by organisation and by purchase, and the model cannot tell you — it can only stop you assuming there is one person to convince.
Frederick E. Webster Jr & Yoram Wind, Organizational Buying Behavior, Prentice-Hall, 1972.
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
Every model in the framework, and where each one belongsIf two segments would be served and reached identically, they are one segment with two names.
The other objects in the Market Core
Market Opportunities
Define the size and accessibility of your market to uncover realistic opportunities for growth and success in your business.
LearnCompetitors
Analyses the competitive landscape to inform strategic decisions and identify opportunities for differentiation.
LearnCustomer Journey
The path from unaware to bought: the real stages, the process the buyer was already in, where people stop, and what actually moves them on. What happens after the purchase is designed in the Omni Core.
LearnMarketing Channels
The platforms and methods used to promote and communicate with potential customers.
LearnContent
Covers everything the organisation publishes: the few subjects it returns to and wants to be known for, the formats it uses and what job each one does, what production actually costs once review and approval are counted, the rhythm it publishes to, and how long each piece stays useful afterwards.
LearnSales Channels
The various pathways through which a company sells its products or services to customers.
Learn