Is it enough to define your market as a group of people? It doesn’t sound very strategic. It wouldn’t stand up in an MBA assignment. The question we must ask ourselves is: Do ‘our’ people want to be strategically defined?
Maybe the term target is better than consumer or prospect? They’re still people, right? I don’t think so. No one wants to be a target. I don’t. Not for anyone, thing or corporation. Makes us feel like a cartoon rabbit in the wrong season.
If we must be more deliberate than using the word people. What can we use and maintain our direction?
I prefer the terms audience or community. An audience can throw flowers or tomatoes. A community creates an environ and decides whose welcome and who isn’t.
Audience implies some level of passivity. Surely you want interaction and engagement… community is closer to that…
One other potential option could be calling, them customers, if you do so long enough it may become true at some point in the future.
I don’t think that “people” is an offensive word. After all, it is what your market is made up of and if you were to generalize the masses then yes, they would be people. You could call them customers, but that sounds so very prehistoric since most of our society steers clear of that word because it takes away a personal feel to any business. We should come up with a new word to use.
…this then goes on to extrapolate into those “Enterprise” software systems often termed CRM. Funnily enough, these often multiple tens of million dollar systems is often lacking the fundamental concept of a “relationship”, i.e. that shared between two people.
It’s my belief and experience that business is conducted between people, and decisions are generally made for emotional reasons often influenced by the real relationship.
Sam.