Attract Your Perfect Prospects by Developing an Audience Archetype

Do you remember Apple’s “Get a Mac” series of commercials that ran from May 2006 to October 2009? 

Hello, I’m a Mac.

And I’m a PC.

The commercials were short vignettes featuring John Hodgman as the sweet-yet-bumbling PC and Justin Long as the creative, hip Mac. Those 66 short spots were named the best advertising campaign of the 2000s by Adweek. 

The success of the long-running campaign leads one to believe that Apple certainly knows who their ideal customer is. Of course they do… because they chose their ideal customer right from the birth of the Macintosh itself. 

That doesn’t mean that everyone responded favorably to the ads. While researching the campaign, I ran across a commenter who maintained that the ads had “backfired” because the PC character was more appealing to him. 

No, the campaign didn’t backfire (no one runs television ads for three months, much less three years, if they’re not working). Instead, Apple chose who not to attract just as much as who they hoped to convert to the Mac.

Apple knew they were never going to get hardcore PC people to switch. Instead, Apple used these 66 humorous little stories to target those who were more likely to “swing” toward Apple, after being educated about the benefits due to the contrast between the two characters. 

That sounds like great content marketing to me. In fact, given the nature and duration of the Get a Mac campaign, it resembled a YouTube channel more than traditional advertising. 

So, once you have a profitable topic that hopefully also relates to your own sense of purpose, it’s time to come up with a better picture of who you choose to serve. While you will learn way more about your audience through the process of delivering value to them (and may even eventually change who you aim for), it’s important to have someone in mind when you start. 

This will inform your initial website copy, the voice you use in your content, and your traffic strategy. Hardly anyone takes the time to do this … and I’m here to tell you it can make all the difference. 

So, in short: Who do you want to attract and serve, and just as importantly, who do you want to drive away? It all comes down to your values, first and foremost. 

What Do You Believe? 

Apple’s values were well reflected in the Get a Mac campaign — creativity, simplicity, and rebellion against the Windows status quo. 

These core values were consistently present in the “Think Different” tagline, the “Crazy Ones” campaign, and before that, the iconic “1984” Super Bowl commercial back when IBM was the status quo. 

What you may not know is that Apple’s core values came directly from co-founder Steve Jobs. Not from focus groups, surveys, or imitating a competitor. 

In other words, Apple’s marketing strategy from the very beginning reflected what Steve Jobs believed was important in life combined with his sense of purpose.

It wasn’t simply that Jobs was “being himself.” He was expressing his strategic best self in the form of the products and messaging his company delivered.

Apple is no longer the scrappy underdog battling the status quo. As one of the most valuable companies in the world, for many they are the status quo. That means the perception of Apple has changed among those of us who were initially strongly attracted to the brand, because their advertising now tries to appeal to a more general audience. 

Jobs would not be comfortable with that. But it’s a good problem to have, and one that our small businesses will likely never have.

Modern marketing is about matching up your worldview with like-minded others. Outside of a monopoly, there is no such thing as marketing that appeals to everyone, and yet, companies still routinely try this and routinely fail. 

On the other hand, think of Patagonia. The founder of the outdoor clothing and gear company invented an aluminum climbing wedge that could be inserted and removed without damaging the rock face. This reflects Patagonia’s founding core value: 

Build the best products while creating no unnecessary environmental harm. 

Of course, not every company has a core value built into the founding story. Most businesses exist to simply sell things that people want, so it’s up to management to find the core values that they want to reflect in their marketing to attract the right kind of customer. 

For example, there’s nothing inherently ethical about ice cream beyond perhaps the choice of ingredients. So Ben & Jerry’s adopted the values of its two founders, which had nothing at all to do with ice cream. 

Not everyone who enjoys tasty desserts necessarily agrees with reduced Pentagon spending and the fight against climate change. But the people who do care about those things turned Ben & Jerry’s into an iconic brand. 

It doesn’t have to be all rainbows and unicorns, either. If your core values fall in line with “greed is good” or “life is tough, get over it,” you’ll certainly find people out there who share these attitudes as part of their worldview. 

You just have to unflinchingly own it, and you’ll attract people who feel the same way, while turning away those who don’t. Don’t hide it, or you’re just another bland person with nothing to say that’s worth hearing.

In other words, you need to understand who you’re talking to. But you don’t just accept who you find — you choose who to attract with what you say and how you say it. 

What Does Your Archetype Look Like? 

In the Get a Mac campaign, Apple literally created a character that personified what their ideal “swing” customer aspired to be. We need to do the same. 

In digital marketing speak, these are examples of buyer personas. Justin Long’s character is the target persona, and John Hodgman represents a negative persona — the type of person you don’t want to attract, and even choose to intentionally alienate in order to resonate more strongly with your ideal customer. ...