Defining the customer for a new consumer category

The question

A venture-backed startup was creating a new consumer category, so most of the people it hoped to reach had never bought anything like it.

Marketing, sales, product and the team choosing new locations all needed to plan around the same customer, down to whom sales should approach and what to say. In a category this new, that customer had to be identified before it could be described, and counted in numbers the business could invest against.

Our approach

On a personal subject, where people reach for tidy and rational answers, we began with a digital ethnography and interviews at home before asking anyone to choose.

Focus groups then reacted to realistic touchpoints, such as a landing page and short videos, adapted after every session, and a national survey built the segmentation and sized the market region by region, with the company’s core team shaping the personas with us at every stage.

What the team came away with

The company had personas built on a national segmentation, a model sizing its market region by region, and a rollout that took the personas to every team.

The rollout ran as working sessions, where colleagues worked out what the personas meant for their own part of the business and what to do next, from sales conversations to messaging.

Matched to the company’s customer records, the personas gave sales and marketing the same people to work from, and the sizing model gave the team choosing new locations a view of where demand was.

“antedote’s project has been foundational to our entire business. It has shaped our national go to market strategy, clarified how we market and sell our product in existing regions, and become the ‘North Star’ in every Marketing and Product decision we make.”

Chief Marketing Officer, venture-backed tech startup