Try not to reach everyone

At training sessions, I always ask participants to write down who they have in mind as their audience. One participant told me he had chosen ‘everyone’ as his audience. He was conducting research into palm wood in Indonesia that is currently discarded as waste. A shame, because you can also make beautiful furniture from it. Instead, however, piles of palm wood lie there uselessly rotting away. ‘I want the whole world to know this,’ he said. ‘Because only then will things change. We need people who will ship it, companies that will make furniture from it, and consumers who will buy that furniture. Honestly Marloes, I’m not exaggerating — everyone needs to know this, otherwise nothing will change!’ How could I help him with this tricky task?

Make choices

It is remarkably difficult to reach ‘everyone’. Practically speaking, it is even impossible. Moreover, a consumer will listen to your story in a completely different way than a furniture manufacturer. You therefore need to tailor your story to each target audience. The magic word is: choose. But making choices feels deeply uncomfortable, because it seems as though you are ruling out all other options.

First, we explored ‘the consumer’ as a target audience. That is still an exceptionally broad group. And how do you reach them? Print a leaflet and stand outside a supermarket? That didn’t sound like a particularly brilliant plan. And even if it worked and every single consumer across the whole of the Netherlands was wildly enthusiastic about buying a palm wood table, where would they actually get one? As we talked it through, the audience quickly shifted to ‘IKEA’. Because IKEA makes and sells furniture and is accessible to a great many households. If IKEA starts making beautiful things from palm wood, that would be a promising start.

More specific

Right, that’s settled. We can get to work crafting a story for IKEA. Can’t we? Unfortunately not — because things go wrong again at this point. Who within IKEA are you going to tell that story to? The cashier, the warehouse operative, the customer service desk assistant? None of that will make much difference. So once again, the task is to be even more specific. The cogs started turning furiously as we worked together to figure out which department within IKEA could help ensure that furniture is made from palm wood. The Purchasing department? Marketing? The design department? In the end, we decided that someone working in ‘product development’ might well be a good choice.

‘The more specific your target audience, the better’

At that point, the challenges suddenly become clear as well. How do you find that person? How do you persuade them to speak with you? And once you’ve managed that, what exactly are you going to say? You need several compelling stories. Blimey, that’s tough. It would have been far easier to simply stick with ‘everyone’. As a researcher, you could just make a short video about your research, put it on your website, and be done with it. You’ve ‘shared it with the whole world’. The only trouble is, very little in that same world actually changes. The IKEA plan is admittedly enormously challenging, but it is considerably more purposeful. And once you have a clear goal, you can always refine it along the way.

The fundamental problem with trying to reach ‘everyone’ is that in practice you make very little impact. The key is to be highly specific about your goal and your target audience. The more concrete, the better. If you don’t know precisely, make an assumption and commit to it wholeheartedly. You’ll soon enough discover whether you’re on the right track or need to adjust your course. It does take a bit of effort before you begin, but it pays greater dividends in the long run.