Blog · Target
Identify your target and understand your customer
There's a question that comes before any strategy: what market fits my business? Getting it wrong is behind most failures — not because the product is bad, but because it was shown to the wrong people.
Published 30 September 2021 · revised 16 August 2026
Why it matters
Defining your target means choosing who not to serve
An excellent product, aimed at people who don't care about that problem, goes unsold. Put that way it's obvious, and it remains the reason so many growth plans produce nothing: they were built around a customer who doesn't exist.
Knowing your ideal customer means knowing what drives them to buy, what they're really looking for, and what they want. From there you can set realistic goals, and shrink the part left to chance.
The one-line test
Write a description of your ideal customer on a piece of paper. Then read it back.
If the description could apply to anyone, you have a problem — and it isn't a marketing problem: it's that you haven't yet decided what sets you apart.
Then
The questions the plan comes from
What problems do you solve better than others? What skills do you offer to whoever asks for your help? Who are your competitors, and what genuinely sets you apart from them?
Answering them means knowing who's worth approaching. And once you've chosen one or two precise audiences, the experience flips: you stop being the one chasing them.
Because networking doesn't mean running around town connecting with whoever crosses your path. It's exhausting and, almost always, pointless. A network that works isn't necessarily big: it holds the right people.
One word at a time
"The right people" is the part that can be calculated
The 2021 article reaches the right conclusion and then leaves it there, as a piece of common-sense advice. Five years later that sentence has become an operation.
The target you know
These are the features of your ideal customer: sector, size, problem. That's the work this article does, and it's useful.
The target you don't know
These are the people who know your ideal customer. They don't necessarily resemble that customer, and they're almost never on your list.
This is exactly what the discipline makes calculable: the Relational Footprint is the declaration of who a person knows, across nineteen business sectors, and on top of that map the calculation produces a match — a deliberately designed introduction between the two right people. Not a profiled contact to work cold: the two parties sit down only after both have said yes.
You know who you want as a customer. You don't know who already has them in their contacts.
The first step
Where your company stands, in one number
AIRA-SCAN© measures the Relational Capital your company already has: ten questions, three minutes, no registration required. Your browser calculates the score and it appears immediately, along with the dimensions where you're losing the most points.
The extended report then arrives by email, and within one working day someone calls you: you look at the result together and assess whether the AIRA-DX© Stoic Analysis makes sense for your company. It's free and limited to twelve a week, so it isn't owed to whoever takes the check-up: it's decided together.
Would you rather just talk it through? The number is 0549 888808.