Week 5, Post 2: Defining Your Target Market

The business I am using for this class is a dog bar (bar/dog park), where people and their pets can go to socialize. The target market for my currently fictional business would be both males and females between the ages of 21-35, who have enough money to go out on the weekends with friends. I would of course hope to get customers older than that as well, but my marketing would be specifically aimed at the younger adults, both professionals and college students. Today's millennial crowd has been shown to treat their dogs as their children, and in some instances, even replace having children all together with owning pets instead (see http://www.millennialmarketing.com/2017/07/pets-vs-parenthood-why-millennials-are-owning-pets-instead-of-having-kids/). This means they want to take them everywhere and experience new things with them. Who doesn't love taking their dog to the dog park? But there is a niche to be filled when the humans want to socialize, too.

The ideal customer would be someone over 21, who drinks and owns a dog that is social. This could be male or female, though my audience may be predominantly female at first; women tend to like to try new things with their dogs, especially for social media reasons (they are more likely to post selfies, check in, etc).

Depending on which location my business is at, I could look at other bars in the area to get a good idea of what type of customers I would be getting, and target them. For this business, I would actually want to be in an area with more competition in terms of bars; people tend to bar hop, and if your bar is in an isolated area, you are less likely to get as much foot traffic. Being that my bar is more unique than the average bar (I cannot find a single dog bar in Southern California), I would not be too concerned with losing people's interest.