Target Market / aka Target Audience
What is it? It is the term for the specific audience (individuals, households, organizations) for whom a product, service or initiative is intended to serve or attract. Target audiences can be large or small in scale, (referred to as the incidence rate depending on the percent of the population they represent.) Criteria used to define this audience can range from numerous or few depending on the business (or research) objectives.
When is it best used? The term target audience is used in marketing, advertising, media buying, research, product and service development, etc. Defining the criteria of your target audience helps to ensure that products, services, communication, etc., are relevant, useful and compelling in meeting their needs and expectations, and informs where and how you will reach them. These criteria also inform the screener used to recruit research participants.
Leveraging your understanding of your target audience, informed by research, is critical to becoming customer centric throughout all aspects of a business, including the entire product development process.
What does it entail? Attributes used to recruit the target audience usually involve a combination of demographic, lifestage, lifestyle, relationship to product/service/company, and attitudinal/psychographic characteristics. Sometimes research is used to determine the characteristics of who a target audience should be, or whether there is a target audience for a product or service.
Screener designs rely on target audience criteria being accurate when recruiting participants for qualitative and quantitative research studies to ensure you are gathering feedback from the right people.
Interchangeable term: Target segment, target user
Related terms: Demographic, users, persona, participant pool / panel
Use in a sentence: Placing the target audience’s primary needs front and center, in every aspect of what we create, is core to the UCD / User-Centered Design process.
Visual: No
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