Product/Audience Match Strategy
Assignment Formatting
Length of assignment is approximately 3-4 pages. Document should use Times New Roman 12-point font with margins not exceeding 1-inch. Assignments should be completed and submitted before due date/times. Late penalty is 10% deduction per day (or partial day) late. No plagiarism, copying or cheating.
Instructions:
As explained in the PDF reading “Matching the Product with the Audience When Marketing Yourself,” it’s critical to understand your product (i.e., your skills, attributes, personality, core values, etc.) and to determine and understand your target audiences (i.e., potential employers, colleagues, customers, career gatekeepers, etc.). For this assignment, you’ll work to outline your potential target audiences, determine what those audiences desire, and then decide how you’ll match your product with your target audiences. Using either a paragraph, outline, or table format, do the following:
1. List Current Audiences. List various audiences (at least 8) to whom you currently market yourself on a daily, weekly, or other periodic basis. These might include potential employers, current employers, friends, family, teachers, various societal segments, social groups, customers, colleagues, employees, store personnel, vendors/suppliers, social media audiences, etc. Don’t forget that these audiences might be face-to-face, online, over the phone, etc. For each audience, be extremely specific as to who this audience is. Don’t just say “store employees” when you can say “the early morning employees at the Starbucks that I go to every weekday.” Don’t just say “my coworkers” when you can say “my co-workers Cristina, Derek, and Victoria who work in the cubicles next to mine.”
2. Importance of Current Audiences. For each of the 8+ current audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each audience help you?
3. What Current Audiences Want From You. Finally, for each of the 8+ current audiences you listed, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Although there may be some similar traits or characteristics across the audiences you listed, each audience likely will desire some unique characteristics as well.
4. List Prospective Audiences. Your next step is to add at least three new “prospective” target audiences to whom you would like to market yourself in the near or distant future. Again, they can be potential employers in a particular industry, friends, social groups, customers, fans, readers, etc. While it’s good to be specific as to the industry, type of people, etc., you don’t have to be as specific as you were in Step 1 because you may not know the details of these audiences yet.
5. Importance of Prospective Audiences. As you did in Step 2 with your “current” audiences, for each of the 3+ “prospective” audiences, provide some insights as to why each particular audience might be important to you in your future marketing yourself efforts. How can impressing each audience help you? 6. What Prospective Audiences Want From You. For each of the 3+ “prospective” target audiences, write down at least three characteristics (features, attributes, skills, traits, values, etc.) that they would desire in a person such as you. Because you may not really know these audiences very well, you may end up estimating this section more than the other ones. Nevertheless, consider what characteristics would be important to each audience.
7. Product/Audience Match. Now consider how well you’re matching your Product You with the desired attributes of the (at least 8) current audiences and the (at least 3) prospective audiences that you listed. Discuss the matches as well as the discrepancies (the instancesin which you don’t match).
8. Changing Product You. Discuss what you can do to have a better match between your various target audiences and the product (set of attributes, traits, etc.) that you’re offering. How can you change your Product You as well as your Personal/Professional Brand to better market yourself to these various audiences?
This section consists of a set of self-improvement recommendations.
