The audience is not everyone

The most common note we receive on a piece of strategy is some version of: could this speak to more people? It is asked in good faith and it is almost always wrong.

A brand that tries to be for everyone is legible to no one. It rounds off every edge that might have made someone choose it, in the hope of offending no one who might have walked past anyway. The result is a brand that is technically acceptable to a large group and genuinely wanted by none of it.

Wanting is specific. It is the feeling that something was made for you, by people who understood you well enough to leave other people out. That feeling is impossible to manufacture at scale, and it is the only feeling that reliably moves someone from interest to purchase.

So when we narrow the audience, we are not shrinking the opportunity. We are concentrating it. A brand that a small group cannot live without will always outgrow a brand that a large group can take or leave. Reach is a distribution problem. Desire is a definition problem. Solve the second one first.