Marketing strategies for two opposite customer groups – trendy & pregnant

Calling on all marketing experts! Or at least any entrepreneur (in-training, even) who has an opinion …

One of our new StartupNation Community Advisory Board members, Aron North, has a marketing dilemma. Aron has asked me to go to the StartupNation community to get some small business marketing strategies advice. Here’s the challenge:

Aron’s company, Perfect Beverage LLC, has identified two distinctly different customer groups for their product, a non-alcoholic top shelf cocktail mix made with all-natural ginger. The two customer groups are:

• 25-35 year old women dancing and drinking in the clubs of Los Angeles
• Pregnant women

Here’s how Aron tells the story …

(Our company is) a welcome victim of (the Unseen Markets) phenomenon. My business is a non-alcoholic top shelf cocktail mix made with all-natural ginger. We want to sell to 25-35 women who are out dancing and drinking in the clubs of Los Angeles. What we didn’t see coming are pregnant women. Yep, they love our product. Ginger has long been known to sooth an upset stomach so these women use it to cure morning sickness. And it works!

The big question I have is how do you market this while not marketing it. You don’t want to lose your edge with the twenty-somethings. We currently don’t have plans to market the product in that manner – we think it would hurt our trendy bar image.

Wow! What a fascinating marketing dilemma. What do you think?

Can Aron successfully market to both audiences simultaneously? Hey, if anyone watched the recent season of the BravoTV series Project Runway (Suzanne and I are hooked – last night was the final episode. Congratulations to Chloe, the winner!), you know that a very pregnant Heidi Klum looked as fashionable & trendy as ever in her stylish outfits.

Should he listen to the market and abandon the initial focus in favor of a potentially larger market base?

How about splitting the company into two distinct brands?

Help a brother out!

By the way, every visitor to StartupNation.com will be able to go directly to the entire community with this kind of question/conversation as soon as we launch the upcoming community forum boards next week. The forums will be a part of an overall new community initiative where everyone will be able to post their own personal profile with links to their own websites, photos of themselves and lots more cool stuff. You’ll be able to position yourself as a mentor or expert in your area of expertise or just join in on the conversations. Stay tuned!