There is a fine line between what some people find in good and poor taste. What one person might think is hysterically funny, another person would find horribly offensive. I don’t need to tell you that we live in a hypersensitive culture, do I? Marketing has long pushed the limits of absurdity in order to catch the attention of a targeted audience. However, there are serious consequences if you step over certain lines with your marketing. Consumers can be quite unforgiving when you do.

How do you know what is just inside the lines? It begins with defining your target market. Who exactly are you trying to sell? What demographic groups make up the target market (age, gender, marital status, location, etc.)? This is the starting point for all marketing. If you don’t know to whom you are selling, you will very likely offend them at some point. If your target market is 18-24 year-old American young people, you would have no problem if your marketing offended their 45-54 year-old parents. In fact, you may find that if you offend the parents, their kids will buy your brand. However, if these parents were your target market, you would have a problem if you tried to force youthful values onto their parents. In the hypersensitive world of identity marketing, this is a minefield. Forcing the values of one group on another with your marketing is bound to blow up your brand. This is the problem that two beverage brands have wandered into lately. In an attempt to skew their target market younger, they misread the values of their current customers.

How do you keep from stepping over the marketing line? You need to understand the thinking of your target market. I have used the word "values” to describe the deeply held beliefs of a target market. In other words, what do they care about so much that their thinking cannot be shaken from its position? There is another level of belief among consumers. That is their "attitude” towards events and popular sentiment in society. We might call these trends. These are beliefs that will change over time. They may be popular or unpopular with your target market, but they come today and are gone tomorrow. If you happen to step over the line with a trending attitude, you can take your lumps now, but your brand will not suffer in the long run. But if you step on someone’s values, they will stop buying your brand, and that may be forever.

The complexity comes when you are trying to market to two different target markets with completely different values. What is the marketing answer in these situations? Stay away from the points where they differ. What has happened to too many brands is that they are trying to attract a younger demographic by making a radical political statement that polarizes older demographics. This is playing Russian roulette with your brand. I find that too many times, marketers have not taken the time to really find out where the lines between values and attitudes lie with their current customer base. This is dangerous. Why? Because there is a third component that comes into play whenever you step on the values of your target market: they have choices. How many brands have been built upon the failure of their competitors to understand the values of the consumers they are both competing to gain as customers? Too many to count!

The marketing line between good and bad tastes may be tricky to define, but you will have a much better feel for it if you get to know the values and attitudes of your target market.