Your Target Market

The very first step in any design process is understanding who you’re designing for. If you’ve studied marketing at all, you’ll be well versed here.

Having studied both marketing and design, we’d say this: marketing goes deep on the quantitative side — data, hard facts. Design is definitely more qualitative, and perhaps a lot of guessing. Either way is better than nothing. Even if you have a good handle on the target audience for your company, it’s worth putting some extra thought into the particular niche or avatarA single, specific person who stands in for the whole audience — given an age, a job, a budget, a Saturday morning. Making one person concrete stops you designing for “everyone”, which usually means designing for no one. this particular design is targeting.

If you’re working in a company, this info is often already written down somewhere. But if you don’t have access to it, just stop and think: who’s actually going to see or use this piece of work?

Defining a target audience isn’t about being perfect. Sometimes it can feel very stereotypical — and arguably less relevant today, when advertising is largely an algorithm reading interests and trends.

Take a gym with a culture of achievement and progress. It can speak to men and women across a wide range of ages, because what it’s actually appealing to is people who love competition, goals, self-improvement and the idea of striving. That’s a taste, not a demographic — and it’s far more useful to design against.

Even a rough idea gives you a starting point. Plenty of companies invest in research to nail their audience down: demographics (age, gender), geographics (where they live), and psychographics (their values, interests, lifestyle). That’s the more traditional way to define your person.

Your target audience matters because in commercial design everything — the visuals, the language, the tone — has to connect with the right people. It’s a key player in capturing attention, establishing trust and resonance, and ultimately driving sales. That’s what makes design in a commercial environment different to art. The really important trick is to put their needs ahead of your own tastes. Over time you’ll get the hang of balancing your personal style with what actually resonates with the people you’re trying to reach. That balance is what makes a great designer: creative flair combined with designs that connect.

Don’t get too hung up on it though. If you’re designing for women, it doesn’t mean everything has to be pink. Avoid clichés and instead think about what’s important to that audience. Even if you don’t have hard data, an educated guess will help guide your decisions — and later it becomes part of your design rationale.

For this course we’re keeping it lighter than a full marketing audience profile. If your company doesn’t have market research, don’t panic. For now we’re just making educated guesses to steer your design in the right direction.

Have a look at the examples below and start building an idea of your target audience — the psychographics column is where those tastes and preferences live. This will be added to the Design Brief, more on that to follow.

Examples of Target Audiences