Don Heymann, Adjunct Professor at NYU, Reflects on Marketing to the Taliban
We business writers can talk about demographics all day long, but we have the best chance of being persuasive if we REALLY know our target audience. Even if they are a bunch of dangerous thugs in the mountains of Afghanistan.

FAIRFIELD, CT, November 12, 2010 /24-7PressRelease/ -- What the hell is a market these days?

Don Heymann, an adjunct instructor at New York University, has been an independent writer and consultant for 25 years, working with major multinational companies and leading non-profit organizations in a range of fields. This is his first in a series of articles that raise key questions that corporate and marketing writers must answer if they're going to succeed. Mr. Heymann has a unique perspective on this topic, making him a popular instructor both in the classroom and across the US, where his ideas and tips help people in communications understand changing audiences in a digital world. The article follows.

As an instructor of marketing communications writing I am compelled to raise the question continuously throughout the course. Why? Because the answer seems to change by the day and a viable answer is needed to give writers a point of entry for communicating successfully.

Sure, the market can be a place, like a supermarket, or an industry, like automotive, including dozens of sub-categories within them.

But today markets are all about human beings - smaller and smaller sub-groups of people with something in common - identified and characterized in detail (for better or worse) thanks to the Internet. We can find out how people identify themselves. We can learn about their politics. We know how they search for information. We know about the information they discard. And of course, we learn what people buy.

So, now we can isolate groups like senior women who like to skateboard. Pre-teen boys who are avid gardeners. Late-era baby boomers born in 1960 who like accordion music. Ex-hippies who joined the Tea Party. Members of the Taliban.

Wait. Did I just say members of the Taliban? Yup, but for a reason.

In the Kumar Province in Afghanistan, the Central Asia Institute is running a thriving school for teenage girls in a Taliban-controlled area. The problem: the fundamentalist Taliban don't believe in educating girls after they've reached puberty. The school survives for two reasons. It's run by the Imam of the local mosque (not an outsider), and he overcomes Taliban protests by calling the school a madrassa. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff explains, "that's less alien to the fundamentalists and gives them a face-saving excuse to look the other way."
To Make a Long Story Short...

We business writers can talk about demographics all day long, but we have the best chance of being persuasive if we REALLY know our target audience...real people, quirky and difficult to categorize in traditional ways.

Even if they are a bunch of dangerous thugs in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Writers write. But if you're in the business of influencing or persuading groups of people, writers need context. Words written in a vacuum have no power or resonance.

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