There is one place that building your brand new clothing store probably isn’t going to be a runaway success; a nudist colony. I would guess they need clothes sometimes, but undoubtedly people who don’t like to wear clothes probably don’t buy as many of them.
Again, convention, context, and value come into play. At a nudist colony, the going convention is not using clothes; therefore, a clothing store is out of context, and your shoppers are unlikely to value the clothing as a fashionista might.
The flip side of this is tailoring your product or service to as targetted an audience as possible. Selling your product to everyone feels right, but it makes it impossible to set expectations and identify specific benefits and communicate them to your audience.
Clothing is an excellent example of this. Clothes generally are marketed by gender and age, so you typically can try to sell clothes to anyone in your broader demographic. But how much more powerful is it to make your brand about something specific.
Think of LL Bean, who focuses on customers who love the outdoors. They market to that audience specifically, and yet you will find customers who prefer the mall to the mountain buying Bean Boots. It isn’t a trade-off. Getting specific helps you market and multiply, and you still reach those out of that target audience along the way.
Unlike the nudist colony clothing store, you must either build your product based on who you want to serve or find your audience based on what you want to offer. Either way, defining the audience is critical to your success!
Have you tried selling clothes at a nudist colony? What lessons have you learned about selling to the right and wrong audience?
