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Halley suggests a benefit sought as a useful base for identifying a target audience. It cuts across all other bases. The example of toothpaste users illustrates this. Toothpaste market has four identifiable segments, e.g.,

• Tooth decay prevention
• Brightness of the teeth.
• One with flavor.
• Mouth freshness.

Targeting, you must understand, makes the marketing mix all the more effective within the context of integrated advertising program. The product matches the consumer profile. The promotional program remains in tune to the consumers’ willingness to receive, assimilate and react positively to the communication. It is recognition of the fact that the market is not a single cohesive unit but it is rather seething in its very essence. It being desperate, pulsating, antagonistic, infinitely varied sea of differing human beings – here everyone being distinct from the others as fingerprints; everyone of them living in certain circumstances and in countless ways from those in which everyone of them is living.

In a country like India where unity is in diversity, identifying target audience for a product is a formidable task. To optimize targeting, the potential of the target market, its needs, its effective demand and accessibility needs must be considered.

A marketing communication starts with a clear target audience in mind. The audience critically influences the communicator’s decision on:

• What is to be said?
• How it is to be said?
• When it is to be said?
• Where it is to be said?
• Who is to say it?