The impulse to broaden appeal is understandable. If the marketing is targeted too narrowly, it will miss potential buyers. If the message is too specific, it will not resonate across the range of customers the business needs to serve. If the brand takes a clear position, it will alienate the segment that disagrees. So the brand hedges. The message is softened until it is true of many things and distinctive about nothing. The targeting is broadened until the audience is "professionals" or "businesses that care about results." The positioning is designed to be impossible to disagree with — which means it is equally impossible to find compelling.

The commercial cost of this compromise is significant and measurable. A brand that has decided to be for everyone has made it much harder for anyone to feel that it is specifically for them — and in a media landscape where attention is the scarcest resource, a brand that does not feel specifically relevant to a person's specific situation has already lost the battle for their attention.

Specificity is the mechanism of resonance

Resonance — the feeling that a piece of communication is speaking directly to you, in a way that you feel genuinely understood — requires specificity. Generic language about generic problems produces generic engagement. Specific language about specific problems, in the voice of someone who has observed those problems closely, produces the kind of engagement that makes an audience say "this brand gets it." That response — "this brand gets it" — is the most valuable commercial signal in marketing. It is the precursor to trust, and trust is the precursor to every commercial outcome that follows.

The cost of the safe middle

Positioning in the safe middle of a market — close enough to the mainstream to appeal to the largest segment, distinct enough to claim differentiation — is a strategic choice that looks conservative but is in fact quite risky. It produces a market position that is neither the first choice for the audience that wants the mainstream option nor the first choice for the audience that wants something meaningfully different. The result is a brand that is considered by many and chosen by relatively few — because consideration without preference produces low conversion rates and high price sensitivity.

A brand that is slightly interesting to everyone is significantly less valuable than a brand that is deeply compelling to a specific audience. Specificity is not exclusion — it is the mechanism through which genuine resonance happens.

Choosing your audience deliberately

The alternative to safe-middle positioning is not niche-to-the-point-of-irrelevance. It is deliberate audience definition: choosing the specific segment of the available market that your product or service serves best, that you understand most deeply, and that has the highest potential commercial value for the business — and then building everything about your marketing around that audience's specific language, concerns, and context.

This choice requires discipline that many marketing teams find difficult: the discipline to decide who you are not primarily for. A B2B software company that serves both startups and enterprise customers faces a genuine choice about which audience should be the primary voice of its marketing — because the startup buyer and the enterprise buyer have different concerns, different language, different decision-making structures, and different expectations of a vendor. Marketing that tries to serve both simultaneously tends to serve neither effectively. Marketing built primarily around one, with a secondary adaptation for the other, typically serves both better.

The audience that evangelises

Brands that make deliberate audience choices tend to attract the audience members who feel most specifically served by the brand — and those members are the ones most likely to refer, advocate, and evangelise. A brand that has been discovered by someone who feels that it was made specifically for them is a brand they will tell others about. A brand that was fine for them — useful, competent, reasonably priced — is a brand they will not think to mention. The evangelism effect of specific positioning is one of its least visible but most commercially significant benefits.

3.8×higher net promoter score for brands with specific, defined audience positioning versus those with broad, inclusive market positioning in the same category
62%of B2B buyers say they are more likely to shortlist a vendor whose marketing demonstrates deep understanding of their specific industry and situation
2.1×higher close rate in competitive deals for brands perceived as specialists in the buyer's specific context versus brands perceived as generalists with broad applicability

Making the specificity practical

The practical implication of choosing a specific audience is not that you reject business from outside that audience. It is that your marketing voice, your content topics, your case study selection, and your messaging framework are all built around the audience you have chosen as primary. When someone outside that audience encounters your marketing, they may still find it useful. But the primary audience — the one you understand most deeply and serve most specifically — should feel that your marketing was built specifically for them. That feeling is what produces the engagement, trust, and conversion that broadly targeted marketing consistently fails to deliver.

Choose your audience deliberately. Then market to them specifically. The business you lose by being specific about who you are for is almost always less than the business you gain by making a specific audience feel genuinely understood.

Is your marketing specific enough to resonate — or broad enough to be ignorable?
We help marketing teams define their primary audience with the specificity that produces genuine resonance — including audience definition frameworks, message testing, and positioning strategy that chooses a specific voice without unnecessarily limiting commercial reach. Book a free discovery call.
Book a Discovery Call →