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Liar in the Campground
Not everyone is your ideal customer persona, but that doesn’t make them a dishonest customer
If you stay in business long enough, you’ll eventually experience a scathing review that makes you question if your customer even used your product or service. Your first instinct might be to defend your business, explain why the customer is wrong, or even dismiss them as unreasonable. But what if that negative feedback isn’t because your business did anything wrong, it’s because you were serving the wrong customer?
In the last three years, my family has camped in 21 states and stayed at dozens of campgrounds along the way. Some campgrounds we’ve loved. Others, you couldn’t pay me to go back to. We recently stayed at a campground in New York that I hated, despite its overwhelmingly positive reviews. After a long conversation with my husband (we had a 300-mile drive to fill), we realized our bad experience wasn’t because the campground was “bad,” we just weren’t their target customer.
Like many products or services, campgrounds appeal to a wide variety of potential customers and must differentiate themselves in their market. There are many customer profiles they could target. Savvy campground owners and hosts typically target 1 or 2 adjacent personas. Here are a few example personas based on some of the…
