How well do you KNOW those receiving your communications? Knowing their interests, likes and dislikes, and what they need or think they need will do wonders in making your communications more effective. Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash.
If the audience you’re speaking to and about is basically yourself — your wants, your message, your agenda — then you need to read this.
Change out that mirror for clear glass.
You need to clearly see who’s in front of you.
And you need to know them.
We’re talking about your target market.
Your audience.
Do you actually know your audience?
Not their demographic profile. Not their age range or zip code or median household income.
Those things matter, but they’re not the same as knowing your audience.
Knowing your audience means:
- understanding what keeps them up at night
- what they aspire to
- what they quietly fear
- what they wish someone would offer them
It means getting close enough to their motivations that your message feels less like a pitch and more like a conversation they were already having in their own heads.
I learned very early in my career that it’s a far easier path to business success when you fill an existing need or want rather than educating the public why they need your product.
In PR, this is audience analysis. And most organizations do it badly.
The WIN Framework
The most practical place to start is what’s known as WIN: wants, interests and needs.
The principle is deceptively simple: you win your audience’s support by addressing their wants, interests and needs, and not by broadcasting what you want them to hear.
This seems obvious. And yet the number of organizations that communicate from the inside out is staggering. Starting with what they want to say is a waste of time. For example:
We’ve been in business for 39 years.
Voted Milwaukee’s #1 pizza 5 years in a row.
The city’s best heating & air company.
Corporate mission statements and mantras nobody asked for. Internal jargon dressed up as messaging. Product features presented without a single benefit in sight. These are all symptoms of communicators who skipped the WIN analysis.
Before you write a single word of a press release, talking point or social post, you should be able to answer three questions:
- What do they want?
- What would interest my audience?
- What do they need or think they need?
That third question deserves special attention.
What audiences think they need is often different from what they actually need. Your message has to meet them where they are, not where you think they should be. That gap, if you ignore it, is where communications go to wither and die.
Maslow Wasn’t Just for Psychology Class
Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the famous five-level pyramid, gets heavy rotation in introductory psychology courses. It’s also one of the most practical frameworks communicators can use.
Maslow identified five levels of human need, from the most basic to the most elevated:
- survival (food, water, shelter)
- security (safety, financial stability, structure)
- belonging (friendship, acceptance, love)
- esteem (confidence, recognition, accomplishment)
- fulfillment or self-actualization (meaning, creativity, purpose)
Here’s what Maslow’s framework tells communicators: people don’t engage with higher-level appeals when lower-level needs are unmet. You can’t persuade someone to think about legacy and meaning when they’re worried about making rent this month.
The applications are practical. A company marketing a financial planning product isn’t really selling a tool — it’s selling security, the second rung of the pyramid. A nonprofit fundraising for adult literacy programs isn’t asking for money — it’s inviting supporters into belonging, the third rung. When you map your message to where your audience actually lives on that pyramid, it resonates.
When you miss the level, it feels tone-deaf. Why? Because it is.
Hidden Persuaders and Deeper Motivations
Sociologist Harold Lasswell identified eight core human motivations:
- power
- wealth
- respect
- well-being
- affection
- skill
- moral correctness
- enlightenment
Effective writing taps at least one of these in every significant message.
Market researcher Vance Packard explored similar territory in his 1957 book, “The Hidden Persuaders.” He identified eight compelling but often unspoken consumer needs, including emotional security, reassurance of self-worth, a sense of roots, and the desire for legacy.
Packard’s book raised serious ethical questions about using these hidden motivators to manipulate consumers. Those questions didn’t go away in 1957. They’re more relevant today.
The difference between ethical persuasion and manipulation often comes down to this: are you genuinely addressing a real need your audience has, or are you exploiting a vulnerability to drive a transaction?
Your audience may not be able to articulate the difference in the moment. But they’ll feel it. And they’ll remember.
Build a Persona That’s Ruthlessly Specific
One of the most effective tools in audience analysis is the persona: a fictional but research-grounded profile of a representative member of your target public.
Here’s why personas work. When you write to “women, ages 30-45, with college degrees and household incomes above $80,000,” you’re writing to a demographic abstraction.
When you write to “Sarah, 38, an operations manager in Nashville who volunteers at her kids’ school, gets her news from podcasts on her commute and has been silently frustrated with her company’s communication for two years,” you’re writing to a person.
The persona forces you to move from generalities to specifics. It makes you answer the questions that actually drive effective communication:
- What would Sarah find valuable enough to share?
- What tone would earn her trust?
- What’s the one thing I could say that would make her feel understood rather than sold to?
Personas should be grounded in real data: customer interviews, survey results, social listening, and demographic and psychographic research. The more rooted the persona is in actual evidence, the more useful it becomes.
A persona built from assumptions is a map drawn from guesses. You’ll still get somewhere… just not where you intended.
What They Don’t Want Matters Just As Much
Effective audience analysis also considers the negative, including what your audience actively resists, what messages they’ve been burned by before, what makes them tune out instantly.
Communications that ignore audience resistance tend to backfire hard. You can’t persuade someone by bulldozing their objections. You persuade them by acknowledging those objections, taking them seriously and addressing them with honesty. That’s not weakness in a message. That’s sophistication.
Your audience isn’t a passive recipient. They’re an active filter. Understanding what they’re filtering for, and why, gives you a fighting chance of getting through.
Know their W-I-N. Then write to it.
The 3 Big Takeaways
- The WIN framework (wants, interests, needs) is the foundation of effective audience analysis. Great PR starts with what matters to the audience, not with what you want to say.
- Maslow’s hierarchy gives PR writers a practical tool for matching messages to the motivational level where their audience actually lives. If you miss the level, you miss the audience.
- Personas transform abstract demographics into specific, human characters. Writing to a real person, even a fictional one, is almost always more effective than writing to a demographic category.
What’s your target markets’ WIN? Do share!
Stay authentic — especially in striving to truly know those receiving your communications.
Jeffery E. Pizzino, APR (seen here in a vintage photo circa 1983 serendipitously doing a Clash impersonation in a since-forgotten location) is a spin-free public relations pro who is passionate about telling the why of your story with clarity, impact and authenticity. He began his PR career in 1987 at Ketchum Public Relations in New York City but has spent the majority of his career as a solopreneur. He’s the Chief Authentic Officer of the Johnson City, TN-based public relations firm, AuthenticityPR. He also functions as the fractional CCO for his clients.
Jeff has an MBA in Management from Western International University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications — with an emphasis in PR — from Brigham Young University (rise and shout!). He’s also accredited in public relations (APR). This Milwaukee, Wisconsin native holds an Italian citizenship and plans to live and work there someday. Jeff and his storyteller wife Leticia have four children and four grandchildren. In his extremely limited nonwork hours, he studies Italiano, practices guitar, write songs, gardens, works out, disc golfs, reads, listens to New Wave music, serves as an assistant communication director in his church, watches BYU football, enjoys watching the original Mission Impossible TV series, and plays board games (mostly Dominion and Seven Wonders). No, this guy’s never bored and looking for something to do. Email Jeff.
