Correspondence Regarding Audience Niche Debate
Field researchers have documented a recurring conversation in which creators, advisors, and critics debate how narrow a target audience should be, arriving at no resolution and resuming the debate at a later date.
FIELD NOTES Subject: Audience Niche Debate Observation Period: Ongoing
The debate has been observed across content creation, media strategy, product development, and conversations between two people who have been thinking about starting something for a while. Its structure is consistent regardless of context.
A creator or team proposes a target audience. The proposal is examined. The examination produces two findings that apply to every proposed audience: it is too broad to distinguish from existing alternatives, and it is too narrow to achieve meaningful scale. Both findings are presented in the same session.
Field observations are as follows.
The first observation concerns the inversion. An audience of "everyone who cares about X" is described as too broad to reach because it does not differentiate. When the audience is narrowed to "people between 28 and 34 who care about X and also Y," it is described as too narrow to sustain ongoing investment. The narrower the definition becomes, the more specific the product can be, and the more specific the product becomes, the smaller the viable market is, and the smaller the viable market is, the broader the definition must become.
The second observation concerns the resolution. The debate resolves by tabling. Participants agree that the audience question will become clearer with time, with a first release, with data, with a pilot, or with a conversation they should have with someone who knows more about this. The audience remains unspecified.
The third observation is that the debate recurs. It recurs at every subsequent planning session with the same structure, different participants, and no accumulated progress.
The absurd rule is that the correct audience is always slightly different from any proposed audience, in a direction that cannot be specified in advance.
The contradiction is that the debate cannot be resolved before product decisions are made, and product decisions made without resolving it are the basis for the next debate.
Field notes will continue.