The ICP Concept is Wrong
I got into a bit of a debate today with a Marketing expert on the importance of identifying your Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP.
They claim that it's something you have to do. I claim it's wrong, and that it leads to waste and an enormous number of failures, when it comes to marketing and sales.
In short, according to them, the Ideal Customer Profile provides a detailed description - using attributes such as demographics, firmographics, psychographics and behavioral data to characterize prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service.
Your job then becomes to focus your marketing and sales efforts on those archetypes because, supposedly, that's where you'll get the biggest bang for your buck.
The problem is that, as a strategy, it's almost entirely wrong. And the reason is simple.
In short, the ICP concept conflates Target Marketing and Market Segmentation, and ends up sub-optimizing both.
Here's what you need to know:
Target Markets are groups of prospects (or customers) who have common demographics, firmographics, psychographics, that can be effectively targeted in the media or with sales development efforts.
Market Segments are groups of prospects (or customers) who have common "needs, pains, problems and unmet goals" that you can address.
And rarely do those groups overlap.
Basically, your goal should be to find and reach your market segments. You may only be able to do that via targeting accessible attributes, but if you start by targeting an ICP you will generally miss your market - even if you iterate.
Sorry, but this is just a huge fallacy in the industry. And it leads to a huge number of marketing failures.
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