“Our product appeals to all gardeners.”
On the face of it, that sounds perfectly reasonable.
You have created a gardening product, so why exclude anyone? It might be useful to people with large gardens and small balconies, experienced gardeners and complete novices. Describe the audience as “all gardeners” and the commercial opportunity feels enormous.
But “all gardeners” is not a useful target audience. It tells you almost nothing about the person you are trying to persuade, what they are hoping to achieve or why they might choose your product over something more familiar.
This is where the idea of a bullseye audience becomes useful.
Your bullseye is not the only group who may buy the product. It is the group you are aiming at first: the people whose situation, frustration or ambition gives your product its strongest opportunity to be relevant.
Think of an archery target. You aim at the centre, but you will still reach people around the edges.
The difficult part is deciding where that centre should be.
The wider commercial case for choosing a focused audience is explored in Why challenger brands can’t afford to play safe.
A bullseye is not simply a demographic
It is tempting to begin with familiar descriptions:
- gardeners aged 35 to 55
- environmentally conscious consumers
- urban gardeners
- affluent homeowners
- people interested in growing their own food
These may be useful clues, but they are rarely precise enough to guide the marketing.
Take “urban gardeners”. That could include someone growing herbs on a kitchen windowsill, a family with a modest suburban garden, an allotment holder or a professional maintaining communal spaces. They may live in similar places, but their needs, frustrations and buying behaviour could be completely different.
A useful bullseye should tell you more than who the customer appears to be. It should help you understand:
- what they are trying to achieve
- what makes that difficult
- what they currently do instead
- and what could persuade them to change
The aim is not to find the narrowest possible audience. It is to identify a commercially worthwhile group for whom your product can become a particularly good choice.
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Six questions to help define your bullseye
Start with these questions. This doesn’t have to be complicated. Answer them simply, using the words your customer might use rather than language copied from a strategy presentation.
1. What are they trying to achieve?
Be specific about the outcome.
“I want a nice garden” is too broad. A more useful answer might be:
“I want my small balcony to feel colourful and full of life.”
The second gives you something tangible to work with. You can begin to imagine the plants they might choose, the amount of space available and the practical problems they could encounter.
2. What gets in the way?
Look for the everyday friction surrounding the purchase or task.
It might be:
- lack of storage
- limited time
- low confidence
- mess
- weight
- cost
- confusing instructions
- or not owning a car
These obstacles can be as important as the final product benefit. A customer may want thriving plants, but the thing stopping them from buying compost could be the thought of carrying a large bag home and finding somewhere to keep it.
3. What are they doing instead?
The competition is not always another product.
They may be:
- buying the familiar brand
- choosing whatever is on promotion
- asking someone else for advice
- searching online
- making do with what they already have
- or doing nothing
Understanding the current alternative helps you see what the new product must overcome.
4. What would make them switch?
What would make it feel worthwhile to switch to an unfamiliar brand?
It could be a clearer promise, easier to use, better design, better performance, greater reassurance or simply a product that seems to understand their situation.
Avoid assuming that a longer list of features will be enough. The customer needs a meaningful reason to change what they already do.
5. What phrases would they use?
Try to capture the internal conversation happening before the purchase.
For a small-space gardener, that might include:
“I’ve got nowhere to store a massive bag.”
“I only need enough for a few pots.”
“How am I supposed to carry that home?”
These phrases are more useful than broad labels because they can begin to influence your headlines, packaging hierarchy, imagery and product descriptions.
6. What should they feel when they encounter the brand?
The answer might be:
“This was made for my situation.”
That feeling is important. A customer may not consciously analyse every element of the packaging, but they can quickly sense whether a product feels relevant to them.
If your answers could apply to any gardener, buying any product, your audience is probably still too broad. If they are specific enough to shape what you say and how you present the product, you are getting closer.
Turn the answers into one useful sentence
Once you have worked through the questions, try completing this sentence:
We’re for [bullseye audience] who want [outcome] but are frustrated by [problem].
For example:
We’re for small-space gardeners who want colourful pots and containers but are frustrated by heavy compost bags and a lack of storage.
It is not intended to become a public-facing strapline. Its job is to guide decisions inside the business.
A useful bullseye statement should affect the product, packaging and marketing. If it changes nothing, it is probably not focused enough.
The “say no” test
One of the quickest ways to test your bullseye is to ask what it allows you to reject.
If your bullseye doesn’t help you say no to anything, it is probably too broad.
Imagine a compressed compost product designed for small-space gardeners who grow in pots and need easy storage and transport.
That audience allows the business to say no to:
- large, bulky pack formats
- imagery dominated by expansive lawns and borders
- messages centred on buying in bulk
- and copy that assume the customer owns a shed, car or wheelbarrow
Now compare that with the audience “urban gardeners”.
That description may still include people with lawns, allotments, houseplants, community spaces and large family gardens. It doesn’t help you rule out a big-bag format, lawn claims or vegetable-growing messages. Almost everything remains in consideration “just in case”.
A tighter audience is more useful because it begins to guide real choices.
Saying no can feel uncomfortable. Someone in the business will almost certainly point out that a person with a large garden might still buy the product.
They may be right. But that does not mean the marketing should be designed equally around them.
Choosing who matters first is not the same as deciding who may buy later.
Create three “not” lists
A simple way to protect the focus is to create three short internal lists.
We’re not primarily for…
These are customers whose needs should not dictate the marketing.
For the compressed compost example, this might include people with large gardens who want the biggest possible bag at the lowest price.
We’re not trying to be…
These are product positions that would distract from the central proposition.
The product might not be trying to be the most technical, professional-grade compost in the category.
We’re not promising…
These are claims that may be technically possible but would weaken the focus.
For example, “perfect for large beds and borders” would pull attention away from compact storage, easy transport and small-space gardening.
These lists are not public declarations, and they do not ban anyone from buying. They help prevent the positioning being gradually weakened through meetings, sales requests and rounds of amends.
Without that shared filter, each urgent brief can begin pulling the brand in a different direction, which is how marketing gradually becomes scattergun.
When someone asks, “Can we include this as well?”, you have a clearer basis for deciding whether it strengthens the proposition or simply adds another message.
The five-second fixture test
Now picture the product on a busy garden centre fixture.
The shopper is not carefully reading every pack. They are scanning a crowded display of products using similar formats, colours, plant imagery and claims.
Give yourself five seconds.
Would the bullseye customer:
- notice the product
- understand what is different about it
- and feel that it is especially relevant to their situation?
For the compressed compost product, the pack might lead with:
Compact compost for pots, patios and balconies
The small box-like format, lightweight nature and easy-storage message would support the proposition. The imagery would show the situation the customer recognises rather than a large traditional garden.
The customer should not need to study the back of the pack before discovering why the product suits them.
If the important difference only becomes apparent after several minutes of explanation, the fixture is doing too much work.
Test the bullseye without betting everything on it
Choosing a focused audience does not mean making a blind bet.
You may already have useful evidence from customer questions, reviews, sales conversations, search behaviour, retailer feedback or the way existing customers use the product. Begin with what you know and identify what you’re still unsure about.
Then find a manageable way to test the idea.
For a product already in retail, bullseye-specific POS may be a sensible starting point. A header board, shelf talker or wobbler could address the audience’s primary frustration and introduce a clear product promise without requiring an immediate packaging redesign.
You could compare how shoppers respond, whether they spend longer at the fixture, ask more questions or choose the product more frequently.
Depending on the product and route to market, other tests could include:
- alternative product-page copy
- a small digital campaign
- retailer conversations
- mocked-up packaging
- customer interviews
- or testing the proposition within one channel or region
The purpose is not to prove that every assumption was correct. It is to learn which parts of the audience definition and proposition are creating a stronger response.
From a broad market to a useful target
If your product feels invisible, the problem may not be its quality. It may be that the audience is so broadly defined that the packaging and marketing never become particularly relevant to anyone.
A useful bullseye gives the team a clearer basis for decisions. It helps you prioritise the benefits, choose the right language, brief your packaging and shelf communication, and explain the product’s role to a retail buyer.
You do not need perfect market research before you begin. You need a commercially credible hypothesis, a willingness to make choices and a practical way to test whether those choices improve the response.
Because “our product appeals to all gardeners” may describe who could buy it.
It does not tell you who is most likely to buy it.
Need help defining your bullseye?
Our “New Product Marketing Guide” takes you through the bullseye, point of difference, proof, brand expression and launch assets you need to make a product easier to choose.