When you study business or marketing, they teach you that when you sel something, you need to choose a target audience. Are you trying to catch men in their twenties, just out of university? Or young mothers? Or maybe retired home owners?
It makes sense if you are trying to build a business. As much as we hate stereotypes, plenty of people fit them. I don’t think we were born to fit these stereotypes but culture can be very persuasive.
When every other girl around you wears makeup, it becomes hard not to as a woman, even if it wasn’t something you cared about or liked initially. If the men around you like sports, as a man, you better like sports or prepare to be the odd one out. And when every other kid has a playstation, you want a damn playstation.
Adults are no different from kids.
I believe we all have a more fundamental drive to discover things that uniquely fit us, but our minds are so filled with other things to think about, and we don’t just want to be liked, we may NEED to be liked to find a job and to help our kids avoid being bullied and to avoid problems with our spouses parents and to find paying customers.
Fitting in is a matter of survival.
Not only does being different from people’s expectation in the wrong way make it harder for us to navigate the world around us, advertising and pop culture do everything to keep us where we are. At the very best, they encourage us to be a more ideaized version of what is exceptable in our community.
So if you were a nerd you could be a tech CEO.
If you are from a poor neighborhood in rhe US, you could be a rapper or a basketball player.
Sometimes it’s too practical NOT to fit a stereotype, and society gives you no other immediate option. Many Nepalese people in Japan open Nepalese/Indian restaruants. That’s what people trust them to do and may be the only way they could get a visa to stay here.
I am guilty of this as well to some extent!
So we market to a demographic because enough of them fit a certain stereotpye and many of those stereotypes are reinforced by further marketing towards them.
But there are always those of us who don’t fit the stereotype and even more of us who are cruious about things outside of our limited context.
The common way to market to those people is to invite them into a different in-group, with it’s own rules, that way they may not fit the stereotypes they were born into, but they still fit the stereotype.
An example of this is K-pop. It’s fans no longer consist of just 13 year old Korean girls, or even 13 year old Asian girls or even 13 year olds or even girls. But it can continue to be marketed to the original 13 year old girl demographic because people from all over the world are into K-pop now so it can just keep being what it is.
But what if you are interested in people that are not so easily boxed in? Good luck marketing towards that!
I refuse to believe it’s impossible, and some have proven that it is very much possible, but there is no clear path, no formula that works, you’ve just gotta keep trying at it.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. It’s been done and you can find examples of it. Some things just work, but without tapping into some group identity or another, without trying to capitalize on stereotypes, it seems to take a certain kind of magic, a genuine spark, an infectious personality or a whole lot of trial and error.
I wish it wasn’t this hard, but I guess it’s hard so that the journey to finding my own path trains me to be capable of carrying a torch in the darkness, of becoming that guy who does what no one thought possible again and again.
When I write books it’s for the wandering souls, the people eho don’t know why their here or maybe they do but don’t see a clear path towards their ideals but would rather die than give up on them.
When I write music it’s for people who know the darkness and honor that part of themselves by feeling everything rather than looking away, but believe in the light and always walk towards it.
When I write blogs and coach, it’s for Africans and Cubans and Japanese and Germans who know there is more to life than the bubble they were born in, and who have the drive to create their own culture collaboratively rather than just inherit it. Maybe they will stay in their hometown their whole life or maybe they will travel the world, but they want to doctheir part to shape the culture around them, even on a scale as small as their own family or workplace.
This is far more challenging than writing for white men in Asia , or American’s born in the 80’s but my people are not so easily defined by race, location or hobby.
Even travel has been far too huge a niche for me and backpacking or study aborad is far too small and easily stereotyped. I want to write these blogs for someone from Ibadan or Khatmandu or a small village in Georgia as mich as I want to write for someone in New York or Tokyo or Shanghai, the three of which I’m much more familiar with.
Furthermore, I want to keep things open and accessible to people who don’t know much about subculture and music while also acknowledging that that is thr zone where I feel most at home.
I don’t want to hide or push my own experience to the side in order to relate, rather, I want us all to share become more aware of our different experiences and what kind of pressures we may have from the society around us and protect each other from them in a sense so that we can become more empowered to decide how we want to live.
The closest thing I can find to a niche is the NF’s (INFP, ENFJ) in Myer’s Briggs personality types. That’s the Infutitive Feelers. I guess you could say I do everything for these people. They are notnunited in cultural references or experience but I think we tend to speak the same language when we are aware of each others different experiences and allow for some cultural differences.
I’m still not sure how I can present my work in a way that is just as inviting to a drunken Tokyo guitarist and a curious biology student in Ghana or in the case of my students, a full-time worker who bellydances on the weekend and a entrepreneur who coaches boxing on the side….
For now my answer is just to keep doing it my way until enough people understand that it all goes a little smoother. And I guess you could say that despite setbacks and certain periods of confusion, it’s all gone relatively well.
According to the “common sense” of society, I should be doing a whole lot worse than I am!
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If Kyoto wasn’t Kyoto…. - Home recordings
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I so love this. And hey, I am now one of your 'non-existent target audience. 😀