Have you ever been talking to someone in marketing and got so overwhelmed by all the jargon you just gave up?  Like any profession, marketing has its own language which doesn’t make much sense if you’re not part of the group.  The thing is, most SME owners have come to grips with the basics of other professional languages, like accounting, in order to deal with the people important to the running of their business.  So why not marketing?  Why do we make the effort to understand a balance sheet but not brand equity?

You could argue, and many would, that the financial aspect of managing a business is by far the most important to understand.  But it’s a bit of a chicken and egg situation; you can be a guru at managing your cash flow but if nobody knows about your product there’ll be no cash coming in to manage.

I started thinking about this after a chat with a very marketing-savvy colleague of mine about a fairly new trend.  “Neo Consumers”, or “NEOs” account for more than half the discretionary spending in Australia, yet they make up less than a quarter of the population.  According to Roy Morgan Research, they “read more, know more, earn more, are more ethical, demand more and spend more than anyone else…”  Sounds like an attractive target market doesn’t it?  At first you’d probably think they’d be easy to pick; the group that earns the most.  Well, actually, no.  The thing about NEOs as opposed to the AB Demographic of the past is that they earn more because they’re NEOs, not the other way around.

Many NEOs are also part of Generation C, first detected in 2004 by Trendwatching.com.  Unlike Gen X’s and Y’s, Generation C doesn’t apply to a specific age group, the C stands for Content and anyone who contributes text, images, audio or video to the Internet is considered a member.   Whether a consumer occasionally posts photos on the web so friends and family can easily access them, or goes all out with a daily blog, Generation C has spawned a whole new market for inexpensive web products.

So what have NEOs and Gen C’s got to do with small business marketing?  They’re important market segments, and they’re different from the segments we’ve traditionally understood to exist.  While they may sound like just more marketing jargon, they’re influencing how marketing managers around the world are directing multi-million dollar budgets… and there’s no reason why a business with the smallest of budgets shouldn’t be learning how to target them as well.

The point is, it’s not about any one market segment in, it’s about understanding that different consumers will be attracted to your good or service for different reasons, so the way you sell it to them should also be different.  Thankfully it doesn’t mean you have to spend more on marketing, you just have to spend some time really working out who your target markets are and how to best get to them.