You know that I make a big deal about the step before content draft creation where Bredemarket asks questions and creates the plan. But sometimes that isn’t necessary.
Some music managers insist on a pre-programmed planning session to truly engage the target audience.
“I was f—ing around with this stupid little riff,” Slash recalled to Q Magazine in 2005, via a Guns N’ Roses fan archive. “Axl said, Hold the f—ing phones! That’s amazing!”
And that finger exercise, a guitar version of a Bach invention, was the birth of “Sweet Child O Mine.” The band continued to develop the riff into a complete song.
Or almost complete. Producer Spencer Proffer thought the song needed a breakdown at the end.
According to Slash’s autobiography, written with Anthony Bozza in 2007, Axl Rose listened to the demos on a loop, then started muttering “where do we go?” to himself, thinking things over.
Jobseekers, including myself, have endured endless debates about the pros and cons of LinkedIn’s “Open to Work” green banner. While these debates seem to have died down, there are still arguments about whether the green banner does more harm than good.
The good? Legitimate employers know that you are open to work.
The harm? Scammers, AI-powered resume writers, and other ne’er-do-wells also know that you are open to work.
Customers won’t find you unless you buy this shady service
But this is not confined to jobseekers.
Bredemarket receives an uncounted number of telephone calls, from multiple numbers, all of which begin with the same question: “Am I speaking to the business owner?”
The caller then offers a free consultation regarding your Google Business listing and your Google voice search results.
And when I bother to take the calls, they are disappointed to hear that Google yanked my Google Business listing (Google never told me why, but I assume it relates to the fact that I do not physically conduct business at my UPS Store mailing address).
And that it was the best thing for me when Google did that.
You don’t walk up to my office and request a retainer or hourly services or small projects. You contact me by various means and we talk, you in your office and me in mine. Even the local customers aren’t going to drop by, especially since my City of Ontario business license prohibits me from meeting customers at my home.
Anyway, all these cold callers are NOT part of Bredemarket’s target audience.
And the myriad of Google Business Listing advisors are just one of the types of people who have no interest in buying my services.
How to attract real prospects
So I create Bredemarket’s content to attract identity, biometric, and technology marketing professionals. Two recent examples:
Since I am not really a business-to-consumer guy, I tend to think of hungry people (target audiences) who number in the hundreds or thousands rather than millions. For example, if you want to sell your identity/biometric solutions to banks with total assets of over US$100 billion, there are only about 100 of them.
Marketing products in this environment requires a completely different mindset. Rather than hiring a Kardashian or Jenner as your influencer or spokesperson, you’d hire a Buffett. (If you could. You probably can’t, unless he owns the company.)
Therefore you need to concentrate on the players who make buying decisions, from the CxO level down to the users. That is the way to get your product into the enterprise.
But if enterprise penetration is your goal, you’re doomed to failure.
Why an enterprise-only strategy will fail
For example, enterprises usually don’t buy automated biometric identification systems. Government agencies do.
Believe me, I know. Many identity/biometric firms sell to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and their orders have been disrupted on and off since last October.
One acronym that I love to use is B2G—business-to-government. But I’ve learned the hard way that many people have never heard this acronym before. (Scan the job descriptions and spot the ones for marketing to government agencies that require “B2B” experience.)
So Bredemarket doesn’t seek clients that only sell to enterprises. I seek those that sell to organizations, both private and public.
If your identity/biometric or technology company markets products to organizations and you need strategic and tactical assistance, talk go Bredemarket.
If you’re new to my writing, you’ll notice that I use the phrase “hungry people” a lot. You probably want to know why: did I miss breakfast or something? Actually, “hungry people” is my phrase that I use instead of “target audience.” Here’s why.
You are not a target
At its worst, “target” implies something that you shoot, in a William Tell sort of way. If your weapon hits the target, you and your son don’t die. If your weapon misses low, you kill your son. Is that what we marketers do? Hopefully not.
An audience is a group of people that sit in chairs while you perform your song and dance in front of them. (“These are the seven questions your content creator should ask you. Thank you for coming to my BRED talk.”)
Sometimes the audience just sits. Not good.
Sometimes the audience claps. A little better.
If you’re the Beatles or Cheap Trick, the audience screams. But still not enough.
Clapping or screaming is nice, but this doesn’t count as true engagement. I mean, in a way it would be nice if you scream with joy at this post, but it counts for nothing if you don’t actually buy Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services.
You are hungry people
So I resolved not to use the term “target audience.” After considering “needy people,” I finally settled on “hungry people” as a temporary phrase. I figured that unlike “needy people,” “hungry people” are more inspired to act on their needs. They don’t just clap or scream; they are motivated to search for something to eat.
2 1/2 years later, I haven’t thought of anything better.
And if you need my help to address your hungry people, book a free meeting with Bredemarket.
I prefer the term “hungry people” to the term “target audience” because it conveys the idea of those who really really want your product.
The buffet.
And therefore it stands to reason that you want to write content for your hungry people.
For example, if you’re selling automated fingerprint identification systems to cops, your content should probably talk about protecting residents by identifying bad people and keeping them off the street.
“When you spend your time scanning your environment, adapting to those around you, and adjusting your communication style accordingly, you can start to lose yourself, lose sight of your message, and become forgettable.”
Let’s face it. If everyone mirrors their target audience, and they have the same target audience, how can you tell them apart?
I hope that Scott Swann and Ajay Amlani forgive me, but I’m going to use them as examples.
Years ago Ajay, Scott, and I were associated with IDEMIA and/or MorphoTrak, but we have each gone our separate ways.
Ajay Amlani is now at Aware, a U.S.-based biometric company that sells to multiple audiences, including law enforcement.
Scott Swann is now at ROC (formerly Rank One Computing), a U.S.-based biometric company that sells to multiple audiences, including law enforcement.
Aware and ROC could simply mirror the needs and desires of U.S. law enforcement and mirror them back. But if they did that, Aware and ROC would appear identical and interchangeable.
And they’re not.
Aware has been around for several decades and offers everything from components and tools to full-blown automated biometric identification systems. Amlani, a new arrival, has a background that extends back to the FIRST version of CLEAR, along with multiple roles within the federal government and the private sector (including the aforementioned IDEMIA, where we did early work on venue identity verification solutions).
ROC is a newer arrival with a laser focus on several biometric modalities. Swann joined ROC after a long career at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and other federal government entities, followed by time in the private sector with MorphoTrak (where we worked on Morpho Video Investigator together, a potential solution for Boston Marathon bombing events) and IDEMIA National Security Solutions.
What is Sterne’s advice for Amlani, Swann, and others who don’t want to simply reflect their prospects? Here is what Sterne does:
“I write about what I’m interested in, and while I do write for all of you (and hope you get some value from what I share), I mostly write for myself, to explore ideas. In other words, I forget about the room when I write….
“When you write for yourself without considering a person or group of people, you end up writing more personally and often more universally.
“The irony is that by writing for yourself, you usually create something that others can connect to more deeply….
“And the more you write from this place, the clearer you get on your voice, priorities, and overarching ideas, the better able you are to create something that resonates.”
Personally, my hope is that my infusion of myself in my writing helps me to stand out and to better communicate what Bredemarket can provide to identity/biometric firms.
Some of you may not remember the neutron bomb…and some of you do.
Since 1945, the common depiction of nuclear devastation was of catastrophic damage to people and buildings within a large area.
But then the concept of the neutron bomb was developed. Britannica explains:
“A neutron bomb is actually a small thermonuclear bomb in which a few kilograms of plutonium or uranium, ignited by a conventional explosive, would serve as a fission “trigger” to ignite a fusion explosion….
“Its blast and heat effects would be confined to an area of only a few hundred metres in radius, but within a somewhat larger radius of 1,000–2,000 metres the fusion reaction would…be extremely destructive to living tissue….”
As the popular press summarized it, neutron bombs, unlike older uranium or hydrogen bombs, would spare the buildings and kill the people.
What was missed was that the neutron bomb will kill fewer people in a smaller area.
The benefit of the neutron bomb?
The limited damage area promoted a theory in which neutron bombs could be used on the battlefield to target a limited group of enemy troops. This limited range would theoretically confine the damage to military targets without damaging “a whole civilization.”
But this benefit is also a detriment, as Britannica notes.
“However, other military strategists warned that fielding a “clean” nuclear weapon might only lower the threshold for entering into a full-scale nuclear exchange…”
And of course some opponents objected to the very idea of killing ANY people while leaving the buildings intact. Capitalist values at the forefront?
If you’ve never heard of the neutron bomb, they pretty much disappeared after the end of the Cold War.
Which is odd when you think about it, because the end of the Cold War made countries more likely to conduct small-scale wars against each other. From a military tactical perspective (ignoring the strategic or moral issues), neutron bombs seem perfect for such exchanges.
“A purple squirrel is a candidate so rare and perfectly matched to what you need that finding one feels impossible. Someone who checks every single box, including boxes you didn’t even know you cared about.”
Then Welsh provided an example of a purple squirrel, a man named Sagar Patel who worked for him at PatientPop.
On paper pyramids
At the time PatientPop had less than $40,000 in annual revenue, so it didn’t have a huge marketing department. It didn’t even have Bredemarket as a product marketing consultant because Bredemarket didn’t exist yet. And anyway, at the time I knew next to nothing about PatientPop’s healthcare-centered hungry people, physicians who needed to attract prospects and clients via then-current search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.
Google Gemini.
Patel could have launched into a complex, feature-laden SEO discussion, but his target physicians would have responded, “So what?” Doctors want to doctor, not obsess over choosing trailing keywords…and understand the benefits of a solution immediately.
“So Sagar grabbed some notebook paper and drew five sides of a pyramid. He labeled each one, describing his ‘5 sides of local SEO for healthcare providers,’ and then taped them all together.
“He made himself a little paper pyramid to use in his sales pitches.”
Google Gemini. My prompt asked Nano Banana to create a “realistic” picture.
Was Patel’s paper pyramid an effective sales tool for PatientPop? Read Welsh’s article to find out.
What’s your paper pyramid?
Too many companies wait months for the perfect marketing solution instead of doing something NOW and refining it later.
Bredemarket’s different. I ask, then I act.
I ask, then I act.
Once I’ve set my compass, I get my clients a draft within days. Last week alone I turned out drafts for two clients, moving them forward so the content is available to their prospects and clients.
With my suggested schedule for short content—three day drafts, three day reviews, three day redrafts—your new content can become your online “secret salesperson” within two weeks or less.
Don’t believe me? This post alone is chock-full of links to other Bredemarket posts and Bredemarket pages, all of which are functioning as “secret salespeople” for me every single day.
If you want secret salespeople to work for you, talk to me and we’ll devise a plan to improve your product marketing awareness RIGHT NOW.
As I’ve said before, there may be many different stakeholders for a particular purchase opportunity.
For the purpose of this post I’m going to dramatically simplify the process by saying there are only two stakeholders for any RFP and any proposal responding to said RFP: “business” people, and “technical” people.
Google Gemini.
The business people are concerned about the why of the purchase. What pressing need is prompting the business (or government agency) to purchase the product or service? Do the alternatives meet the business need?
The technical people are concerned about the how of the purchase. Knowing the need, can the alternatives actually do what they say they can do?
Returning to my oft-repeated example of an automated biometric identification system purchase by the city of Ontario, California, let’s look at what the business and technical people want:
The business people want compliance with purchasing regulations, and superior performance that keeps citizens off the mayor’s back. (As of January 2026, still Paul Leon.)
The technical people want accurate processing of biometric evidence, proper interfaces to other ABIS systems, implementation of privacy protections, FBI certifications, iBeta or other conformance statements, and all sorts of other…um…minutiae.
So both parties are reading your proposal or other document, looking for these points.
So who is your “target audience” for your proposal?
Both of them.
Whether you’re writing a proposal or a data sheet, make sure that your document addresses the needs of both parties, and that both parties can easily find the information they’re seeking.
If I may take the liberty of stereotyping business and technical users, and if the document in question is a single sheet with printing on front and back, one suggestion is to put the business benefits on the front of the document with pretty pictures that resonate with the readers, and the technical benefits on the back of the document where engineers are accustomed to read the fine print specs.
Google Gemini. It took multiple tries to get generative AI to spell “innovate” correctly.
Or something.
But if both business and technical subject matter experts are involved in the purchase decision, cater to both. You wouldn’t want to write a document solely for the techies when the true decision maker is a person who doesn’t know NFIQ from OFIQ.
Bredemarket 