Everyone is the most popular customer. Every company I have ever worked for, every consulting job I have ever taken, every kickoff with a CRO and a whiteboard, sooner or later the question lands on the table.
“So… who are we for?”
Silence.
Someone coughs. Someone doodles in their notebook. Then someone says, with a little bit too much confidence, “Honestly? Everyone needs this”.
But everyone means everyone. Non-profits. Regional banks. The guy who invented QR codes. Dogs with purchasing power. If you possess consciousness or a budget, I’d love ten minutes of your time.
And I get it, because choosing feels like losing. Every segment you cross out is money you’re saying no to, hypothetically, which is the best kind of money because you never have to collect it.
“Everyone” is the only answer where nobody in the meeting gets sad. The founder keeps chasing Nike. Sales keeps chasing Dave’s Plumbing.
Consensus has been achieved. This is what adulthood looks like.
But after the meeting, we have to write a homepage for everyone. Try it sometime. Open a blank document and write one sentence that speaks to every business, every buyer, every industry, every level of seniority.
You’ll end up with something like “Helping organisations unlock growth through innovative, scalable solutions.” It’s a remarkable sentence where every word means something on its own, but together … not so much. Then comes the media plan. Where do you advertise to everyone? LinkedIn? Google? Trade shows? TikTok? Billboards? Skywriting? The answer, again, is “a bit of everything”, and every channel gets just enough budget to fail independently.
So when the leads inevitably don’t come, the instinct is to rewrite the homepage and run the campaign again, but slightly louder this time.
It’ll fail again, don’t worry.
An impossible assignment executed brilliantly is still an impossible assignment. So hand it back to the kickoff where it came from and ask the question again. Who is this for, but this time with one answer off the table.
Because the not-so-funny thing is that we all know “everyone” isn’t true.
The sales team doesn’t cold-call Antarctica. The product isn’t translated into dolphin. We’re perfectly capable of excluding people. We just don’t like admitting it in meetings.
Choosing who you aim at is not choosing who is allowed to buy. A dartboard does not get smaller when you aim. It just becomes possible to hit something.