Avatar

The “Customer Avatar” is a thinking exercise for marketers. It’s a filter used to dial in a marketing message to a particular audience.

Avatar in the traditional sense described a human walking the Earth that was a manifestation of a God or supernatural creature. It was adapted in the modern era of videogames. You are the ‘God’ and Super Mario is the Avatar. The evolution from that was games where you could create your Avatar instead of simply taking the one that was created for you by the game designers.

The expression customer avatar embodies this principle. It’s perhaps closer to the Greek myth of Pygmalion, where in a sculpture created an idealized person that the gods brought to life.

The customer avatar is your idealized customer that you sculpt and try to bring to life.

The marketer is challenged to think of who their customer is and create as detailed and complete biography for that person as possible. What her name is, what she looks like, her age, her job, what her childhood was like, how she commutes to work, what extracurricular activities she takes up.

You create a fictional person, with complete biographical information, that is your most ideal client. Do this so thoroughly that you could say you know this person better than a roommate.

Then, tailor your marketing message and all communications though you were speaking directly to that person. Your message will be so specific that it will be very difficult for your intended audience not to hear it.

Your message will be like calling their name from across a crowded bar. It cuts through the noise and locks them in.

There’s some related concepts worth talking about. Lets call the first one the ‘snowball vs the dart’ bias.

People resist the idea of tailoring their message to the avatar because they want to attract a large audience. This is the ‘dart’ where you think that even if you hit the bull's-eye and spoke to one client, you’ve missed 99.9999% of the dartboard.

The reality is that it's more like you’ve hit the dartboard with a ‘snowball’. Yes, you’ve hit your target, but you’ve also hit a bunch of nearby targets that are similar to your intended target. Once the snowball splatters onto the dart board with a strong enough impact (a strong enough message) you’ll find that you’ve covered a pretty sizable part of the dartboard.

The second concept I’ll relate to the first. “The Outside Ring”

The outside ring of your dartboard represents the people you don’t actually want as clients. The unqualified, the uninterested, the undesirable…. By creating a specific, targeted message, you in fact magnetically attract your ideal clients and repel the clients you didn’t want anyways. These could be people that are simply uninterested in your business, or they could be people that are interested in your market but have values unaligned to yours.

As an example, a well known marketing thought leader once commented that early in his career he used to deal with a lot of black hat marketers. He found that he was attracting students that he himself didn’t wasn’t to be around.

He retooled his message and his business, and low and behold he started attracting marketers that were genuinely interested in solving peoples problems. By extension, he felt the people that contracting him were making the world a better place by creating a win-win situation for everybody involved.

His Customer Avatar was a good person who believes in ethical marketing and providing real value. His snowball brought the message to many people who fit that bill, and missed the outer ring of undesirable clients.