Target customer profiles help retailers and marketers understand customers who buy your line.
When you own or manage a fashion line, a target customer profile, also referred to as a target audience profile, helps your marketing firm or division zero in on specific sections of the consumer market. This allows your fashion lines marketing dollars to stretch further and yield a greater return for each advertising dollar you spend. A target customer profile is also a helpful tool to utilize when choosing boutiques or retail partners for your fashion line. When you align your fashion with a clothing store that tailors to the same customer base you do, you increase the likelihood that your clothing will regularly sell.
Instructions
1. Compile market research data collected by your company. Your target audience profile requires relation of facts and figures accumulated through sales information and, potentially, surveys targeted towards consumers of your line.
2. Pick a format for your profile. You can organize profiles into a paragraph format that relates your target customer in prose form such as "The typical ABC fashion line customer is a 25 to 35 year old woman with a college education." Alternatively, your profile format can list predominant customer attributes in a bullet-list and provide a larger spread of data in coordinating tables.
3. Present the age and gender of your target audience. In fashion, zeroing in on the age and gender that your line serves rapidly eliminates a number of consumers and potential retail outlets. Present your demographics in prose form or plug the data into your bullet-list or charts.
4. List the education level, income and relationship status of your target audience. This data is particularly helpful in establishing the type of stores that would carry your fashion line and the types of publications to advertise in. For example, a couture line would not fit in on the racks at a retail store and an ad for retail store jeans would not work in a haute couture magazine.
5. Relate the geographical location of your largest audience in a manner that most serves your fashion line. For example, a fashion line devoted to cool-weather clothing would best present target audience information by separating sales data according to climate zones instead of using individual state or country borders as reference points. Present more traditional data separations in a separate report or as a supplement to your main target audience profile write-up.
6. Present data about the thoughts of your customers as reported through customer surveys or focus groups. Focus on data relating to your customer's shopping habits and thought processes through the use of terms like "impulse buyers," "thrifty consumers," or "trend-followers." This data helps you match your line with potential retailers whose shoppers possess the same buying tendencies and tailor your advertising to market-appropriate publications.
