My old marketing teacher always like to tell two stories to underline the challenges of finding of product/target fit.

First story was about this company he worked for that made these highly sophisticated air analysis instruments. The company had always imagined their target market where engineers.

But when they did some analysis of their clients they where surprised to find quite a lot of chimney cleaners buying it.

It was way beyond what they needed but they found it it made the chimney cleaners feel more sophisticated.

The other story he told was about this industrial soap company he had worked for. They had one series of soap that they where betting on. When sales failed they had lots of soap on stock they couldn't get rid of. But one of the guys in the lab had fooled around with this idea about putting this glimmer stuff into the soap.

My teacher always having a good intuition for opportunities knew a guy in the retail industry found out that young girls had been slowly but surely more aware of buying their own cleaning products in earlier ages than usually.

So what they did was to lower the dryness of the product, make it pink and put in the glimmer. And lo and behold they sold this stuff like candy.

Talk about a pivot.

My own experience in the advertising industry have had it's surprises too. The biggest one was that in Denmark Audi's where not primarily sold to the cool jetset that the advertising depicted but rather to successful plumbers, blackschmiths, restaurant owners. etc.

And this brings up an interesting question.

Do people still buy based on what they aspire to be?

One thing is for sure though.

You have to "run the program" before you can see what will happen.