At Sky Zone, we’ve defined our ideal customer profile as a seventeen-year-old boy named Landon.
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Many leaders are asking about the “Why” for their organizations, but not many are asking enough questions about their “Who.”
Too often, the topic of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) gets punted over to marketing. And even in marketing circles, conversations about a company’s ICP turn into a pretty pile of data. But there is no personality or soul.
If you’re leading an organization of any kind, you’d better know your Who. You’d better have a clear picture of them in your mind, not just some statistics about their demographics.
The most successful companies are those that practice the art of defining their ICP in granular detail. They’re crafting a multi-faceted person like a novelist would do, not solving equations like a mathematician. And at Sky Zone, that person is Landon.
Find Your Landon
Running a trampoline park is unusual enough, but at Sky Zone, we developed a somewhat unusual R&D process. We “gave birth” to an imaginary customer we named Landon.
To move Landon from a simple customer profile to being a “real” person, we defined everything we could about him.
“Landon is a seventeen-year-old boy who loves extreme sports, video games, and he’s probably got a couple of empty energy drinks on his bedside table.”
We even defined his taste in music, the books he read, and the food he ate. He became real to our team.
So much so that whenever we had R&D meetings, we saved a spot for Landon. He even had his own nameplate. Every idea had to be run by Landon. We had to see the world through his eyes. And if he didn’t approve of something? We either trashed the idea or took it back to the drawing board.
And not just in R&D meetings. Landon became famous company-wide. Our managers and employees all knew who Landon was, and they were trained to optimize the Sky Zone experience for Landon.
Believe me, I know how ridiculous that sounds. Especially the nameplate part. But that’s just how serious we were about defining our ICP. He became a core member of our team, and still is to this day.
So often, companies are only defining their ICP in terms of how to get more return on ad spend (ROAS) or how to optimize their distribution strategy. They’re not thinking about how to elevate the entire experience for their ICP.
You have to do the work of finding your own Landon. That means zooming in, not zooming out. When you zoom out too far, your message becomes too vague, and you’ll miss the very people you want to reach.
Why Your ICP Matters So Much
You need that specific, zoomed-in version of an ICP because that’s how you stop “solving pain points” and start delivering “joy points.”
That’s why Landon mattered so much to us. Yes, he only represented one type of person who visited our parks—teenage boys. But at the same time, that’s why he had to become our thought leader in the demographic chain of customers.
See, if we had aimed ideas strictly at younger kids, we would have risked coming across as cheesy and childish to teens and young adults. Our marketing was most effective when we spoke directly to Landon. From there, the message would ripple out to the rest of the market.
If a seventeen-year-old boy thinks something is cool, then so will the younger kids who want to be like him. And so will the adults who want to feel seventeen again and forget about “adulting” for a few hours.
At first, this may seem like a “fluffy” exercise. You may be tempted to say, “I’m running a company, not writing a movie.” But without Landon, the Sky Zone story could have looked very different. My book Off the Ground explores this idea further, showing how you need to keep elevating experiences for your customers and your team.
Your next step is simple enough:
Dedicate one meeting with your team to finding your own Landon. Make it fun. Maybe even a little silly. If you exercise this lost art of specifically defining a single ICP, you’ll gain a fresh perspective that most of your competitors don’t have.