How to Choose Your Target Audience
willda design studio rethinking
brand strategy
And why "Whoever Buys My Product" is the wrong answer
Ask a founder who their target audience is, and there’s one answer I dread hearing.
“Whoever buys my product.”
I get why it’s tempting. Narrowing down feels like turning customers away, and when you’re trying to build something, turning anyone away sounds insane. But “everyone” is a wish. And a brand built to speak to everyone ends up speaking to no one in particular, which, in a market full of options, reads as forgettable.
Here’s the uncomfortable bit underneath it: you don’t get to pick your audience by who turns up with a credit card. You choose them on purpose, first — and then you build your product, your brand, and your marketing that fit them like they were made for them. Because they were.
Let me break down how to actually do that.
Demographics tell you who, psychographics tell you why.
Most founders, pushed a little, can give me a demographic sketch. "Women, 30 to 45, urban, decent income." It's a start. But that's the dry, outside version of a person: age, gender, postcode, salary. It tells you who might buy. It tells you nothing about why.
The why lives in psychographics: values, attitudes, lifestyle, hobbies, beliefs, what they aspire to, what they're anxious about, what they can comfortably afford and choose to spend on. This is where the real insight sits.
And it's that why that a brand actually speaks to. Two women, both 38, both in Berlin, both earning well, one reads ingredient lists like legal contracts, the other just wants one joyful ritual at the end of a brutal day. Same demographics. Completely different brands. If all you have is the demographics, you're designing blind.
So go past age and income. What does she do on a Sunday? What's on her nightstand? What does she want to be true about herself? That's the layer that tells you how to speak, where to show up, and what to stand for.
Stop inventing personas and think of real people.
Here's where a lot of brand work quietly goes wrong. Someone opens a slide, invents "Sophie, 34, loves yoga and oat-milk lattes," drops in a stock photo, and calls it strategy. Sophie isn't real. Nobody's ever met Sophie. And it shows — the branding comes out exactly as generic as she is.
Don't invent a persona. Think of an actual human.
Someone you know. A friend. A friend of a friend. A former client. A real, specific person with a real, specific life, whose problem your product genuinely solves. Picture her. What would make her roll her eyes? What would make her feel seen? The single most useful branding instruction I can give you: write to one real person, not a made-up composite of a thousand.
And if you can — this is the part almost nobody does — actually talk to them. Not a survey. A conversation. Ask what they use now, what annoys them about it, what they'd never admit to their partner they spend money on. You'll learn more in three honest chats than in three months of guessing.
Your product probably isn't your differentiator (sorry)
Now the part founders don't love hearing.
You are likely not going to out-innovate the market on product alone. Truly novel products are rare and most "innovations" are only a slightly different version of something that already exists, and even the real breakthroughs get copied within a season. So if your whole brand rests on "our formula is better," you're one competitor away from having nothing to say.
Your differentiator is your brand. The audience you chose. The way you speak to them. The world you build around the product. It's whether a specific person looks at you and thinks this is for me before they've read the product description.
Which means product and audience aren't a one-way street: "here's my product, now who'll buy it." It's a conversation. Your product shapes who it's for, and who it's for shapes how the product looks, feels and sounds. Get that loop right, and the brand does the heavy lifting the product alone can't.
"I don't know, maybe women in their early thirties" isn't an answer
If you're starting out and someone asks who your audience is, and the honest answer is "I don't know… women in their early thirties, maybe?", that's not a target audience. That's a shrug with a number attached. And it means there's homework to do before your marketing can work.
Here's what you actually need to know about the person you're building for:
What keeps her up at night and the real pain your product speaks to.
How you answer that pain, in the product and in the world around it.
Where she spends her time, online and off, and how she behaves there.
What she's into, what she values, who she trusts, who she wants to become.
Whether she can comfortably afford you, and wants to spend on this at all.
Once you know all that, something clicks. You stop shouting into the void and start building a world she wants to step into. You give her reasons to stay, not just to buy once, but to belong. That's how a customer becomes a fan of the product and the brand, and sticks around for years instead of one impulse purchase.
That's the whole game. Not chasing whoever will buy. Choosing who you're for, knowing them properly, and building something they can't help but feel is theirs.
This is exactly what we do
At Willda, this is the part we love most, and it's where every project starts. In our strategy sessions we work out who your brand is really for: the audience with the most potential to become lifelong customers, not one-off buyers. We map who they are and why they buy, how to nurture them, how to speak to them, and how the brand should look and feel so they feel instantly at home in it.
Because a beautiful brand pointed at the wrong person is just a nice-looking guess. Pointed at the right one, it compounds for years.
So if you take one thing from this: your target audience is not "whoever buys my product." It's a decision, made on purpose, built on real people. Choose well, and everything else in your brand gets easier.
Not sure who yours really is? That's exactly what we figure out together.