Dress Shoes for Tall Jewish Men to Wear on Tuesdays

Ask any good marketing person and they’ll tell you one of the most important skills in all of marketing is being able to identify the needs/desires of your target market. Before TIVO came about I always thought it was interesting to see what commercials aired during various TV shows. It lets you know who is most likely to be watching that particular TV show. As a guy you know you’re in trouble when the TV show you’re watching has a lot of women-oriented ads.

The place where I see the most ads (by far) is watching football games, though I don’t exactly understand who advertisers think are really watching football games. Based on the commercials I see on a regular basis the typical football-watching person is a guy who drinks a ton of cheap beer, drives a pick-up truck, eats at fast-food restaurants, needs financial advice and buys lots of IBM Blade Servers. Ads in football games have changed over the years, but the one constant has been the beer commercials. A rough, back-of-the-napkin calculation makes me believe that in my lifetime (just from watching NFL football games) I’ve seen about 5 whole days worth of beer commercials (figure 4 commercials/quarter = ~8 min/game x 2 games/week x 20 weeks/season x 22 seasons of football = ~5 days). Ironically I don’t drink any of the beers that are advertised in games (though I do enjoy those Coors Light ads. I want more Denny Green and Jim Mora!).

Just like any good marketing campaign, retail stores also do a lot of work in identifying their target customer base. Look at Target and Wal-Mart or Whole Foods and Safeway. My personal all-time favorite retail store (from a market segmentation standpoint) is Japanese Weekend Maternity Wear (which is right next to Ben and Jerry’s in Santana Row if you have any desire to patronize them). I’ve always liked to imagine what the conversation to select a target market went like. I bet it was something like this:

Person A: I think we should focus our new store on clothing for pregnant women
Person B: Hmmmm, that’s good idea, but it’s already a crowded space. We need to further segment our target market.
Person A: What if we focused on pregnant women who were Japanese? That’s a highly targeted and unique segment of the population.
Person B: Yeah, that’s true, but I still think it’s too broad. There are literally millions of Japanese women, and many of them get pregnant. We should segment this further.
Person A: Ok, you’re right. What if we focused solely on clothing they wear on the weekends?
Person B: So we’d focus on selling clothing that pregnant Japanese women would want to wear of the weekends?
Person A: Right
Person B: Brilliant!

Every time I pass by the store I think of the Simpson’s episode where George H.W. Bush moves in across the street. In the beginning of the episode the whole neighborhood is having a garage sale. In preparation for the garage sale Marge finds a jean jacket in the attic that Homer had made that says “Disco Stu” on it. She asks who Disco Stu is and Homer explains that he was writing “Disco Stud”, but ran out of space. The joke is completed later in the episode when we first meet the character (who has subsequently appeared in many episodes) aptly named Disco Stu. His friend advises him that he should buy that jacket, to which Disco Stu replies, “Disco Stu doesn’t advertise.” We are left to wonder what the odds are that Homer would actually have a potential customer with that exact name, but who still is uninterested in purchasing the jacket.

In the interests of full disclosure here's the real reason for the name of the store. Turns out "Japanese Weekend" is the name of a dance routine the founder created. I'll stick with my interpretation though. I like it more.