Identifying your target segment is one of the most important steps in building an effective marketing strategy. Itโs not just who youโre building for, but what part of your product theyโll actually value most.
Three years ago, I launched this newsletter by comparing five tech trends to five ski analogies. Keeping the tradition alive, hereโs another winter story.
Meet the same mountain: ๐จ๐ญ Matterhorn to the Swiss, ๐ฎ๐น Cervino to the Italians.
One mountain. Two distinct audiences. Two value propositions.
- Matterhorn (โMatteโ = meadow, โHornโ = peak in German) dominates the Zermatt skyline and adorns everything from Toblerone bars to tourism campaigns. To the Swiss, its shape is iconic and source of pride. A clear, differentiated value prop.
- Cervino, from the pre-Latin root karv (rock), competes in a crowded field. Think: Monte Bianco (Europeโs highest peak), Tre Cime di Lavaredo with the rugged peaks or the queen of the Dolomites, Marmolada. Beautiful? Absolutely. But in Italy, Cervino is just one of many.
So if youโre a marketer chasing product-market fit, the lesson is simple:
Make sure youโre marketing your Matterhorn to the Swiss, not the Italians.
Find the segment for whom your product is unforgettable.
The one who sees it as the only possible choice.
Just like Instagram did.
Instagram began in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app created by Kevin Systrom rom and Mike Krieger. As the co-founders watched how users engaged with the product, one feature clearly rose above the rest: photo sharing. Everything else โ location check-ins, gamified rewards โ felt redundant next to Foursquare. After peaking at just 100 users, they made a bold decision to pivot. They stripped away all but the photo-sharing functionality, refined it with filters, and rebranded the app as Instagram: a name combining instant camera and telegram. [Source] Today, Instagram boasts more than 3 billion users. [Source]
Photo sharing with filters became to Instagramโs audience what the iconic, pyramid-shape of Matterhorn is to the Swiss: the one feature that made the product unforgettable.
Choosing the right target segment is critical, yet itโs only one of the 18 elements in a comprehensive go-to-market framework. If you want a practical structure for turning complex tech into adoption and revenue โ with examples from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Groq and Y Combinator โ get my book ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฃ๐น๐ฎ๐ป ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ง๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฆ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐๐๐ฝ๐ โฌ๏ธ
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