"Who Run The World?" The Impact of ICAs on the World Around Us

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 (you are here) | Part 4

You’re in part 3 of a series on the spectacular failures of Ideal Client Avatars (ICAs) and Client Personas. In part 1, I made a bold claim.

Ideal Client Avatars (ICAs) are garbage for 3 reasons.

1. They obscure insight

2. They don’t deliver the results they promise

3. They actually make the world a less equitable and more poisonous place.

The kicker? None of this is hyperbole. Read on to understand why

Impact on the World

ICAs literally set us up for failure.

And if that weren’t bad enough, ICAs don’t stop there. They don’t leave it at setting you up for failure. They actively make it easier to overlook certain kinds of people. The visibility game is rigged. And ICAs help keep it that way.

Most of us know about cognitive biases—the learned brain chemistry that often subconsciously determine how we behave. The scripts that program our brains. Think the reciprocity rule and the rule of threes. Well, as it turns out, that learned brain chemistry is also responsible for the underrecognition of certain kinds of people and communities. More specifically, we’ve all been conditioned to allocate our attention in discriminatory ways as well.

Take for example the Racial Attention Deficit.

The researchers who discovered it were able to empirically demonstrate that white Americans are 33% more likely to overlook their black peers for their white peers. And that’s even when they’ve been incentivized to pay attention to those peers, and when they know that black peer likely has information or specialized knowledge that may help with a pressing problem. When both of these things are true—what we know as brand salience in our field—the gap is 33%. At least.

The Racial Attention Deficit is one of dozens (and growing) of cognitive biases I have taken to calling visibility biases.

Learned brain chemistry that allocates our attention in discriminatory ways.

The visibility game is rigged.

Here’s where ICAs come in:

1. You can only profile who you know to be aware of. So if there’s someone you’ve been conditioned to overlook… Well, take for example the story of this company I heard about. They settled themselves into a Brooklyn analog and set up that location to meet the demographics and psychographic realities of their ICAs. One such detail was the payment system. You couldn’t pay with cash or a card. You used your phone. Now their ICAs loved this. Less so the folks who actually lived in the community they’d planted themselves in. Many didn’t have cellphones with tech that made virtual cards possible. And so they couldn’t engage. Underrecognized folks are overlooked as relevant brand stakeholders all the time.
   
   And I barely need to mention what happens when big brand decisions are made without accounting for all of the relevant stakeholders. See: every backlash and seemingly self inflicted injury the Fortune 1000 have ever made.
   

2. For those who are underrecognized, ICAs introduce different risks. Just about any underrecognized person will tell you that when walking into a room where they need to get folks to yes, it’s not enough to know who your ideal audience is. You’ve got to know who your advocates and other informants are. And that’s if you even manage to get past the gatekeeper. ICAs pretend like that reality disappears when we start operating at the brand level.
   
   It does not.
   
   So while ICAs do introduce unnecessary risks for those on the over or adequately recognized side of the equation, they are especially risky for underrecognized folks.
   

3. Demographic and psychographic segments are the goal. And that’s because homogenous segments are easier to manipulate. On the surface, that only sounds kind of gross. But when we remember what some of those easier to manipulate, homogenous, echo chambers have been up to lately, we start of understand why this is less a slightly slimy tactic and more a powder keg ready to explode—again.

So…what do we do? What can we do about it?