Welcome to the positioning stage, the commercial heart of the course.
Everything you decided in the essence work now has to meet the market, and the market's first question is brutally simple: who is this for?
Most founders answer that question badly, and in a very specific way: they answer it generously. Everyone who might benefit. Several segments, all equally important. We want to include everyone. I understand the instinct, because narrowing your audience feels like shrinking your market. Here is the principle this lesson is built on: audience work means choosing who must understand and believe the brand first.
One message, one audience
Choosing is unavoidable because communication works like physics. Preference has little say.
Every audience carries different knowledge, different pressures, different vocabulary and different doubts. A message calibrated for all of them at once gets diluted for each of them individually. The website that addresses six audiences reads like a lobby directory. The deck that pitches to everyone persuades no one. You have felt this from the receiving end: content that is clearly for someone like you lands differently from content written for people in general.
And here is what makes the generous answer especially costly: vagueness compounds. An unclear audience makes the value proposition unclear, which makes the positioning unclear, which makes every brief, every page and every campaign harder to judge. Half the downstream confusion in a brand traces back to this single unmade decision. So we make it now, properly.
Primary, secondary and influence audiences
Choosing means ranking. Every group keeps a place. Three tiers do the job.
The primary audience is the group whose understanding and belief the strategy is built around. They shape the language, the proof, the channels and the tone. One group. The discomfort you feel typing only one group is the feeling of strategy happening.
Secondary audiences matter commercially, and the primary audience sets the voice they hear. You serve them and build specific assets for them, and you keep the core message pointed at the primary audience.
Influence audiences rarely buy, and they shape the environment in which buying happens: press, analysts, communities, regulators, funders and respected voices in your field. You want their comprehension and goodwill. Conversion is a bonus.
The practical rule: the homepage, the core deck and the brand voice belong to the primary audience. Everyone else gets pages, sections and materials of their own. That single rule resolves most of the messaging fights teams have, because most of those fights are really two audiences arguing over one paragraph.
One caveat for complex sales. If you sell to organisations, the decision is made by several people: a user, an internal champion, an economic buyer, procurement, and sometimes a blocker. One group still shapes the strategy, and it is usually the person whose belief the others depend on, the one who carries the case internally. Name the other roles beside them in your notes, with what each needs to hear, so the secondary materials have owners. One primary audience per asset is the rule; pretending the buying committee does not exist is not.
FieldArc audience map
Worked example · FieldArc288 words · about 1 min
Here is FieldArc making this choice, and its situation is deliberately difficult: it genuinely does serve several groups.
The honest long list: landowners and estate managers. Restoration project developers. Corporate sustainability teams buying credible nature outcomes. Investors and funders. NGOs and public agencies. Every one of them is real. Every one of them could justify a campaign. And building the primary message around all of them would give FieldArc the lobby-directory website every platform company in this space already has.
So FieldArc chooses: the primary audience is landowners and estate managers responsible for degraded farmland. The people who control the asset. There are three reasons, and notice that the reasoning matters more than the answer. First, nothing happens without them: they control the asset every other audience cares about. Second, they are the hardest audience to win and the most valuable to hold: a platform trusted by landowners becomes credible to everyone upstream. Third, their needs discipline the product towards practical planning and honest data, and away from dashboard theatre.
Project developers become the secondary audience: served seriously, with their own materials and their own proof, and they hear the voice built for landowners. Corporate buyers, investors, public agencies and NGOs become influence audiences. They shape the market FieldArc works in, and they see the same evidence.
Feel what this choice immediately does to the brand. FieldArc must now sound practical, credible and grounded, like someone who has stood on degraded land, because that is what landowners trust. An institutional or abstract tone is ruled out, even though the institutional audiences would tolerate it, because the primary audience would switch off. One ranking decision has already started writing the voice. That is what a real audience choice does.
Choose the audience that shapes the strategy
Three tests for your own choice, in your workbook now.
The dependency test: which audience, if they doubt you, makes everything else irrelevant? The leverage test: which audience, once won, makes every other audience easier? The discipline test: which audience's needs, taken seriously, would make your product and message sharper?
Often the same group passes all three. Sometimes the tests disagree, and that disagreement is worth an hour of your time, because it usually reveals a real strategic fork in the business.
One reassurance before the workbook: this choice can change later. Primary audiences shift as companies mature. The one position you cannot survive is refusing to choose, because then the market chooses for you, and the market chooses confusion.
Next lesson, we go one level deeper: from the chosen group to the actual human being inside it.
Key takeaways
- One message can serve one audience well. Choose which.
- Three tests: dependency, leverage, discipline.
- One group sets the language, proof and tone; the rest get materials of their own.
Go deeperCommon mistakes, a self-check before you move on, how this differs by kind of company, and where the thinking comes from.
Common mistakes
- Answering who is this for generously, with several groups all equally important.
- Letting a secondary audience bend the homepage and the core deck.
- Refusing to choose, so the market chooses confusion for you.
Before you move on
- Have you named exactly one primary audience and written the reasoning?
- Which audience, if they doubt you, makes everything else irrelevant?
How this differs by kind of company
- B2B. Choose the role. Company size matters less. The economic buyer and the user are different audiences.
- Consumer. Choose by situation and mindset. Demographics come second.
- Services and consultancy. Choose the client you do your best work for, even when another pays more.
- Non-profit and impact. Beneficiaries, funders and partners are different audiences. Decide which one the brand is built around.
Set your company type in the dashboard and each lesson will lead with the note that applies to you.
Where this comes from. Segmentation basics follow classic marketing (Kotler); the primary, secondary, influence tiering is the practical version used in Aaron's client work.
Do this now
- In the Audience segmentation section of your workbook, list every real audience group honestly. Keep the whole list at this point.
- Run the three tests and choose one primary audience. Write down your reasoning as well as the answer. The reasoning is what you will defend to your team.
- Assign each remaining group to secondary or influence, and note one thing each tier needs from you this year.
- Then write one sentence: because our primary audience is X, our brand must sound like Y and must never sound like Z. Keep it. We will use it in Stage 4.
Unlock the workbook
The lessons are free to read and always will be. The working tools unlock with an email. They are the workbook in every decision lesson, the dashboard, the alignment scan, the strategy document and the generated briefs. That is the whole price.
The printable workbook and the FieldArc example are open to everyone on the downloads page. Your email also signs you up to Changemakers, Brighter Future's newsletter, where new courses are announced first. You can unsubscribe from any issue.
