The Persona Pitfall that MBA Classes Often Still Miss: How Your Target Audience Could Be A Multi-Million Dollar Liability and 2 Tools to Help
As featured in Inman News.
What’s the fastest way to reach new clients if you don’t have an existing book of business and you don’t want to buy a list? Target marketing to a specific persona!
Social media makes marketing accessible for almost everyone. Yet, without a target, marketing may feel like you are ineffectively throwing spaghetti against the proverbial wall to see what randomly sticks, which often happens when you create a plethora of engaging social media content but don't see tangible business results. Thus, there are numerous articles and videos on how to target by developing a specific marketing persona (a.k.a. a buyer persona or target audience). So that is not the point of this article.
However, there is a sophisticated and crucial tension in developing an effective marketing persona in a highly-regulated industry that most MBA degree curricula miss, which I intentionally teach in my MBA classes:
How do we define our target audience in a way that is simultaneously effective for marketing, legally sound, and ethically responsible, promoting fair housing and lending?
Caption: Let's go back in time with our Delorean time machine.
To begin, let's revisit the start of the millennium in our Delorean. You arrive at the local mall and notice music blaring and strong cologne emitting from a dark, club-like area with long lines. As you walk closer, you see numerous shirtless men greeting patrons and arranging clothes. Eventually, you see the words "Abercrombie & Fitch".
Caption: Long line to enter A & F back in the 2000s.
If we flash forward to now, the once-popular Abercrombie & Fitch clothing store has been spoofed numerous times on MADtv (the sketch show that gave birth to the Key and Peele show) and has agreed to pay a landmark $50 million settlement with the EEOC (2004) for discriminatory hiring practices. How did they go from long lines to being a laughing stock with a $50 million bill? The EEOC's key finding was that the company's "restrictive marketing image" (a.k.a. marketing persona) was a tool for exclusion.
Whether you were aware of or even around for the millennial heyday of this clothing store or not (it has had a bit of a resurgence lately due to TikTok), the cautionary tale of Abercrombie & Fitch demonstrates what happens when the strategy for a marketing persona excludes any protected classes (read: it can backfire catastrophically, reaching beyond customer strategies to even employee policies). Ultimately, the Abercrombie & Fitch IRL case offers a non-negotiable lesson that a marketing image/persona is a strategic tool, not a license to exclude.
For example, when a persona like "Persona Pat, working executive, single mom, aged 28-39" becomes the anchor of your entire strategy, it introduces critical constraints that may create a negative ripple effect. The most straightforward digital advertising to reach "Persona Pat" by age, gender, location, or even mom-status could raise compliance issues under various laws. Frankly, that is a real-world dilemma because when we are marketing, we do not get to create in a bubble, void of rules or consequences.
Is There a Framework to Easily Identify "Marketing Misses"?
It may feel incredulous that non-lawyers are tasked with creating a marketing strategy that upholds fair housing and is legally sound in a litigious society. Make no mistake, this tension is not about you needing to enroll in law school (unless you just want to). So, what are marketing teams, particularly those without legal counsel present at every meeting, to do?
The path forward has been to shift from demographic targeting, particularly if it includes legally protected classes, to psychographic and behavioral targeting (which is both precise and usually compliant, but still check!). In other words, targeting "Working executive, single moms aged 28-39" for Persona Pat can be risky. While "The Home & Garden Enthusiast, who subscribes to home and garden newsletters and print magazines, uses TikTok, Discord, Facebook and Instagram to save open house events, has asked questions about how to juggle buying and selling a home on Reddit, and has attended an open house event in the last 2 months," approach for Persona Pat is more strategic in avoiding legal landmines. Moreover, notice "Pat" is a unisex name, so no gender is targeted either. The second persona is built simply on documented interests and actions, meaning fair housing and lending are less likely to be violated.
To make it easier to deepen your strategic diagnosis, consider how tried and true MBA tools, like a SWOT and PESTLE analysis, can help you analyze if your marketing persona might land you in legal hot water. To get out of a marketing bubble that may be creative yet risky with SWOT, ask what the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats are. With PESTLE, you examine the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, and Environmental factors that impact the marketing strategy. As shown in the graphics below, note specifically the "L" (Legal) and "T" (Threats) sections, where you proactively identify various landmines before building your marketing campaign and strategies.
Caption: According to Miro (n.d.), here's an example of topics to question when evaluating a marketing strategy.
Caption: Whenever you are tasked with reviewing the shortcomings of a strategy, SWOT and PESTLE analysis ideally should come to mind (Jones, 2022).
In short, don't be shy about recommending to your team, "We need to do a SWOT and PESTLE analysis!" Frankly, over the last twenty years, I have kept various organizations where I have consulted out of trouble by simply facilitating that team through, what they called, "my fancy business school learnings.” It was a simple SWOT/PESTLE analysis exercise where everyone (with quintessentially different viewpoints) contributed.
In other words, tools like PESTLE and SWOT are not merely random academic exercises for only MBA students; everyone in business (degree or not) should regularly apply these frameworks. These tools are not required when marketing, but using such tools whenever you work on any type of strategy would ideally save you time, allowing you to leverage the tools of a “fancy MBA degree”, whether you have that degree or not.
Dr. Lee Davenport is an MBA graduate school professor, real estate coach, and author (including of Be a Fair Housing D.E.C.O.D.E.R., How to Profit with Your Personality, and over 270 news bylines). Dr. Lee trains and empowers business students, executives and real estate professionals around the globe on how to work smarter with their unique personalities and how to “advocate, not alienate,” so everyone has access and opportunity in real estate and business.
Sound off - I would love to hear from you! Give me a shout on Instagram and YouTube. Here's to your success! #LearnWithDrLee
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