Written by
Abbie Mason
You Should Know Who You’re Not Marketing To More Than Who You’re Marketing To. Do We Agree?
Because if your target audience is everyone, your marketing usually ends up meaning very little to anyone.
Introduction
“You should know who you’re not marketing to more than who you’re marketing to.”
It sounds like good marketing advice.
And, mostly, we agree.
Because if your target audience is everyone, your marketing usually ends up meaning very little to anyone.
But there is a catch.
Being clear about who you are not for can sharpen a brand. Being too enthusiastic about excluding people can also shrink your opportunity before the campaign has even started.
So where is the line?
Good marketing needs a "no".
Strategy is about choices.
You cannot be the cheapest, most premium, most accessible, most exclusive, most family-friendly and most disruptive brand in the category simultaneously.
At some point, you have to pick.
That is why knowing who you are not marketing to is useful. It forces you to define the job your brand actually does.
Mark Ritson makes a similar argument around segmentation and targeting: good targeting means making deliberate choices about where to focus rather than treating the whole market as one homogeneous audience. But he also argues that targeted activation and broader brand building can — and should — coexist. (Marketing Week)
Read Mark Ritson: Targeting or mass marketing? The answer is both
The benefit?
Sharper creative.
Clearer messaging.
Better media choices.
And far fewer briefs trying to speak to six audiences at once.
But demographics are not the same as relevance
This is where we would challenge the quote.
Your “not audience” probably should not be a neat collection of ages, genders and postcodes.
People do not behave that neatly.
A 25-year-old and a 55-year-old can want the same restaurant experience. Someone can hunt for a £10 bargain on Monday and happily spend £200 on Saturday.
Context often tells you more than demographics do.
Ehrenberg-Bass’s work on Category Entry Points looks at the situations and needs that cause someone to enter a category in the first place. Their argument is that brands benefit from being mentally available across more relevant buying situations. (Ehrenberg-Bass Institute)
Explore Ehrenberg-Bass on Category Entry Points
So perhaps the question is not:
Who aren’t we for?
But:
When aren’t we relevant?
A premium restaurant might not be right when price is the customer’s only priority.
A late-night venue might not be right for someone looking for a quiet Sunday lunch.
A boutique hotel might not be right when somebody simply wants the cheapest bed near the airport.
Those exclusions are useful because they are based on needs and occasions, not assumptions about what a certain type of person does.
It connects closely with something we have written about before: a clear value proposition should define what you offer, who it is for and why someone should choose it. (Lala Communications)
Read Lala: The Power of a Clear Value Proposition
The danger is becoming too targeted
Here is the other side of the argument.
Brands need focus.
Brands also need new customers.
Kantar’s Blueprint for Brand Growth, based on analysis of 6.5 billion consumer data points, concludes that brands grow by being “Meaningfully Different to More People”. (Kantar)
Not fewer people.
More.
Explore Kantar’s Blueprint for Brand Growth
Binet and Field’s effectiveness work points in a similar direction. Short-term activation tends to benefit from tighter targeting, while longer-term brand building generally needs broader reach. (Thinkbox)
Read the IPA overview of The Long and the Short of It
In 2025, Binet went even further, warning that marketing had become too focused on efficiency, targeting and short-term metrics at the expense of scale, reach and actual effectiveness. (IPA)
Which makes the tension pretty clear.
Targeting creates relevance. Reach creates opportunity.
You probably need both.
Even the platforms are telling us to loosen up
This is particularly interesting in performance marketing.
Google’s own guidance on optimised targeting says its systems can look beyond manually selected audience segments to find additional people likely to convert.
In other words: tell the platform what you know, but leave it some space to discover what you do not. (Google Help)
Read Google’s guide to optimised targeting
That matters because one of marketing’s easiest mistakes is confusing an assumption with an insight.
“We’re not for people who only care about the lowest price.”
Fair enough.
“People over 50 aren’t interested.”
Based on what?
“We’re not designed for this particular occasion.”
Useful.
“We’ve never targeted men before, so men aren’t our audience.”
Not so useful.
The data should always have permission to prove the strategy wrong.
As we have said before at Lala, the best marketing sits somewhere between creative instinct and evidence. (Lala Communications)
Read Lala: Marketing and Maths — Connection That Drives Performance
Conclusion
So, do we agree?
Yes. With an asterisk. Brands should know what they are not. They should know which needs they do not serve, which occasions they are not built for and which customers they would have to fundamentally change themselves to attract. That creates clarity. But there is a difference between knowing your boundaries and deciding too quickly who could never buy from you. The first is positioning, and the second can become a blind spot. So know your no. Build your marketing around a very clear idea of what you offer and when you matter. Then leave enough room for the market to surprise you.