Creating an Antivar to Understand Who Your Ideal Customer Isn’t
The purpose of the customer profile is to get a better idea of who your best customers are, but one thing that people sometimes overlook when talking about how to build an ideal customer profile is the importance of learning who your best clients aren’t.
This is where you can create an anti-Avatar (let’s go ahead and call it an Antivar) that you can use to get a better understanding of the people who don’t fit into the category of your best customers.
But why should you care about who your best customers aren’t, you ask? The answer is simple: how to get ideal customers and generate leads for less is all about targeting the right people, and that conversely means not wasting time targeting the wrong people.
To avoid this, you have to know who those wrong people are, and that’s where the Antivar can help.
What is an Antivar?
If an Avatar is a fictional person who is representative of the people you serve, then you can think of the Antivar as the opposite: it’s a fictional representation of the people you don’t serve, and the people who aren’t your best customers.
Another way to think about this is a negative avatar, or the type of person who for sure isn’t a customer of yours, perhaps because they:
- Don’t like your product or service
- Don’t have a need that can be fulfilled by what you have to offer
- Can’t be reached on the right platforms
- Aren’t familiar with brands or technology similar to yours
By knowing who your antivars are, you can eliminate those people from your targeting, save yourself time and money by not marketing to them, and also gain a better understanding of who your ideal customers really are.
Getting to Know Your Antivar
A little while ago we talked about getting to know your ideal customers, and the importance of asking “my best client does (fill in the blank) that nobody else does.”
When creating an antivar, it can help to start with a similar but opposite thought experiment, along the lines of “there’s no way my customer is (fill in the blank).”
For example, if you were a dealer of high-end cars, then you could say there’s no way my customer is poor.
The appropriate characteristic will be dependent on your brand and your product or service, but you want to focus on the same factors you addressed when creating your avatars, including:
- Demographics (there’s no way my customer is old)
- What brands they don’t support (there’s no way my customer would eat at such and such restaurant)
- What hobbies and interests they don’t have (there’s no way my customer would go to a sports game)
- What channels they don’t use to seek information (there’s no way my customer reads the newspaper)
- Who they distrust (there’s no way my customer would follow X influencer)
Discovering Your Antivar’s Dislikes
Just as you want to know exactly what your best customers like and support, so too do you want to explore what your antivar hates, dislikes, and disapproves of, and what they have strong negative feelings about.
For instance, perhaps your ideal customers tend to love ABBA, but your antivar hates Swedish pop. Or maybe your customers are die-hard Packers fans, but your antivar wouldn’t be caught dead in Lambeau Field.
Dislikes can extend to a variety of categories, including technology, brands, clothing styles, and even more abstract things like particular attitudes your antivar might not espouse.
Learning More About Your Antivar Through Brand Ignorance
You can tell a lot about a person based on what they’re familiar with, and you can apply this same logic when you’re creating an antivar.
For instance, if you meet somebody who’s never heard of The Beatles, then there are a few things you might be able to glean from that knowledge, including that the person is likely from younger a generation and doesn’t particularly care about music.
Similarly, you can also tell a great deal about your customers and Antivars based on what brands they are and aren’t familiar with.
Let’s go back to the high-end car dealer example. One of the characteristics of your best customers is that they have expensive taste, meaning they’d probably be familiar with most of the luxury car brands.
Your Antivars, by contrast, may have never heard of Aston Martin, perhaps because they’ve been driving second-hand Chevrolets their whole lives.
Figuring Out What Technology They Don’t Use
Another important factor in how to create a customer avatar is to learn the channels, platforms, and technologies through which you can reach them, and the same (but opposite) is true for Antivars.
When creating your antivar, you’ll want to investigate the types of tech and platforms they don’t use or aren’t familiar with.
For instance, maybe your best customers love browsing the web from mobile devices, but your antivars don’t even have smartphones.
Or perhaps your customers interact with brands they support on Facebook, but your antivar strictly uses Instagram, so you know not to focus marketing efforts on that platform.
Putting It All Together to Learn More About Your Ideal Customer Through Who They Aren’t
Although it’s important to create antivars so you can avoid targeting the wrong people, these negative customer profiles can also tell you more about who your best customers are.
For instance, maybe your antivar is the type of customer who would only buy from you once, so the opposite of that—your best customer—is a long-term repeat customer.
Similarly, if your antivar is old, then you know your best customer is young.
So not only can you use your antivar to eliminate people from your targeting, but you can also use it to get a better understanding of the right types of people to seek out.
Customer profiles are an important tool that can save you time and money in your lead generation efforts, but it’s also important to create an antivar so you have a solid understanding of who your best customers aren’t.
Eliminating the wrong people from your targeting will help you generate more leads and better leads for less, because you won’t lose time seeking out leads who aren’t interested in what you have to offer.
Download your ideal customer profile worksheet today to get started with creating your own personalized Avatars and Antivars.
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