Garage Sale Marketing: Target Market

Part Deaux: Garage Sale MBA

Now that we spent NO time considering the 5 C’s (Customer needs, Company skills, Competitors, Collaborators, Context), we need to take step 2, determining who our target market is going to be, how to segment the market and how to position our goods/services to meet the needs. Well, let me be honest here, we gave this NO thought, but the CMO did do onsite research during the sale and determined the target based on three very common levels.

Demographic: Most users were 35-55 female, some male (85%/15%) that seemed to have lower incomes (no, I did not ask, “what is your annual household income” but I did get to keep a few mufflers and oil streaks).

Geographic: These people came from around here. Over 85% of the people drove to the sale, but there were a surprising 15% that walked. Interesting. See my note on Garage Sale MBA.

Lifestyle: These people were value oriented looking for basics. The GAP learned this lesson when they tried to stray into fashion.

Other: Finally, 100% of the participants were parents, parents, parents with small children.

Here is my favorite part of the entire marketing strategy process: the Positioning Statement. This is how we want potential buyers to see us. The Note on Marketing Strategy gives us a simple template (that I use all of the time):

(INSERT: Our Product/Brand) is (INSERT: Single Most Compelling Idea/Claim) among all (INSERT: Competitive Frame) because  (INSERT: single most important support).

In Our case here it goes:

The Chief Marketing Outsider’s Garage Sale is the largest children’s clothing sale among all current weekend’s garage sales because we have aggregated two former children’s clothing partners to bring in two cars full of inventory along with our truckloads of saved clothing.

Here was our gamble: We were targeting parents who needed to clothe their children during a recession. The baseline garage sale was just selling “garage sale”. People did not know the benefit of showing up. Dolan tells us that “value is created by meeting customer needs. A firm needs to define itself not by the products it sells, but by the customer benefit provided.”

Now that we have determined the target market and positioned our service to meet the market needs, we get to the fun CMO activities: Specifying the plan for the marketing activities to achieve the desired positioning.

Posting tomorrow with Part III: Garage Sale Marketing: Marketing Activities