A centimetre wide, a kilometre deep

Every few weeks a brand sits across from me and tells me who they want to reach, and the answer is almost always the same. They want the professional beauty industry. Sometimes, if they have done a little homework, they will narrow it to beauty rather than hair, and they will say it with the quiet confidence of someone who believes they have just niched down, when what they have actually done is take the lens cap off the microscope and put it straight back on.

From a distance the industry looks like one thing, a hair and beauty sector worth around $12.4 billion in Australia with more than 40,000 businesses inside it. Bring it closer and it splits into recognisable segments, so you have beauty, skin, injectables, dermatology and the doctor-led clinics, each with its own language, its own regulators, its own trade shows and its own idea of what a good result looks like. Most brands stop here, and they stop here because the segments feel small enough to be targetable and large enough to be worth the effort. The trouble is that a segment is still a category rather than an audience, and nobody has ever felt seen by a category.

Zoom in one more time and the picture changes completely. Inside beauty alone there are lash artists, brow specialists, waxing and sugaring therapists, makeup artists and nail technicians, and each of those groups follows different educators, buys from different wholesalers, joins different Facebook groups and would struggle to name three things they have in common with the others beyond a shared ABN category. Inside skin you find corneotherapists who think about barrier function above everything else, dermal therapists and dermal clinicians who were trained to think clinically, and the laser, resurfacing and device-led specialists for whom the machine is the practice. Inside injectables the split is just as real, with practitioners who have built their reputation on filler and volume, those who have built it on anti-wrinkle, a growing group positioning themselves around menopause and longevity, and the pre and post-operative specialists who live between the surgeon and the client. Each of these is a community in its own right rather than a sub-category on a slide, and every one of them is trying to solve a different problem in the treatment room.

This is the layer where brands should be getting the microscope back out, because this is the layer where the gold is. When a brand tells me it wants to target beauty, what it is really saying is that it would like to be relevant to seven different communities at once, which in practice means being mildly relevant to all of them and deeply relevant to none. The lash artist scrolls past the post because it was clearly written for someone doing skin needling, and the dermal clinician scrolls past the same post because it was clearly softened for someone who does not, so you end up spending the whole budget being almost right for everyone.

My advice, and it is the advice I give whether the brand is a global name entering the market or a founder launching her first range, is to go a centimetre wide and a kilometre deep.

Pick the one niche inside the one segment that your product truly serves better than anything else on the shelf, and then commit to it with a seriousness that feels slightly uncomfortable. Learn its vocabulary until you can use it without thinking, know which educators it trusts and which it has stopped listening to, understand what its practitioners charge, what their clients complain about, what keeps them awake, and what they would do with an extra hour in the day. Go so far down into that one community that you could write their content calendar for them.

The reason this matters is that everything else we talk about on this blog, week after week, ladders back to it. Positioning is only a sharp decision if you know precisely who you are positioning against and for, and messaging only lands when it uses the words your audience already uses about themselves. Tone of voice, colourways and brand identity stop being aesthetic choices and become signals, because a device-led clinic and a sugaring studio are not looking for the same visual cues to tell them a brand belongs in their world. Content pillars practically write themselves once you know which three or four conversations your niche is already having without you, and none of that strategic work is any good while the audience is still defined as the professional beauty industry.

What you get in return is a brand that feels relatable rather than merely present, and relatable is what makes it sticky. A practitioner who feels that a brand understands her specific corner of the industry will forgive a slower delivery, a higher price point and a smaller range, because the alternative is going back to brands that treat her as a line in a spreadsheet. She will talk about you in the group chat, she will bring you to her educator, and she will defend you to the rep who turns up trying to switch her out, which is a kind of loyalty that reach alone has never been able to buy.

There is a fear, every time, that going narrow means leaving money on the table, and I understand it, because a kilometre deep in lashes sounds a lot smaller than the whole of beauty. In reality the brands that own a niche are the ones that eventually get invited into the segments next door, because the credibility travels with them, whereas the brands that start wide tend to stay wide and shallow forever. You can always widen a brand that is known for something, but it is pretty hard to deepen one that is known for nothing in particular.

So before the next campaign, the next launch deck or the next distributor conversation, get the microscope back out and keep turning the dial until you can see a single community clearly enough to describe one of its members by name. That is your audience, that is where you go all in, and everything else follows.

If you would like to go all in on your ideal customer profile with Tamara, you can book a 60-minute Strategic Session here and leave with a written strategy that names the niche, the positioning and what to do first.