A public is not everyone who might buy from you. It is a group held together by something in common, an interest, a trade or a standing, which is why what you call my customers is almost always several separate publics, and each one needs to be spoken to differently.
That can sound like a point about vocabulary, but it sits underneath one of the most common thoughts business owners have: that advertising simply does not work for them. The thought usually turns up after a few tries, an ad that was paid for, some posts, perhaps someone who was hired, and a result that looked nothing like what was hoped for. From there it is a short step to deciding that the trade is different, or that the customers just are not like that.
The source calls that thought a symptom rather than a diagnosis, and explains why in one line: “Promotion never works on wrong publics.” To see what a wrong public is, you first need to see what a public is.
The trouble starts with the word
In everyday speech, a public means a crowd of people. In public relations, the work of shaping how people see an organisation, the word means something else entirely. The source explains that it is a professional term, and that it does not refer to the mob or the masses. It refers to a type of audience, a defined group a message is aimed at.
From that comes the idea that changes the picture. The general population is not one big block. It splits into many small, separate publics, and the source says there are hundreds of different types of them.
Age and gender are not a public
Most owners describe their customers with one broad label, and that is where the mistake begins.
Suppose someone says his public is small business owners. That is not a public. It is a statistical category, and inside it sit dozens of publics with almost nothing in common.
The same goes for a label like women aged 30 to 45. That is a demographic slice, a split by facts such as age and gender, and not a public at all. Two women born in the same year may sit in two completely different publics, and react to the same message in completely different ways.
What actually holds a public together
So if not age and not gender, what decides it? The source gives a single test. The type of public is set by some likeness inside a particular group: an interest in common, or a shared trait of profession or of caste, meaning social standing.
Put simply, a public is not defined by who people are. It is defined by what interests them, or by what they do.
Suppose a group of freelance graphic designers. That is a public, because they share both an interest and a trade. Women in their thirties are not, because the only thing linking them is a date of birth.
Residents' committees in shared buildings are a good example of a public. They have a role in common, similar problems, and even places where they meet.
There is also a public most owners forget: the people who have already bought from you. It is one of the strongest publics there is, and what its members share is their relationship with you.
The opposite case is everyone who lives in one part of town. Nothing joins them apart from where they live, so they are not a public.
Why it changes what you say
The source does not stay at the level of principle. It names publics outright: a community public, meaning townspeople who belong to no other special public, a staff public of the people working in the company, a shareholders' public, a youth public of everyone under twenty, and a doctors' public that someone is trying to reach.
It also makes a point about the language itself. In professional use you do not talk about children, teenagers or old people, but about a children's public, a youth public and a senior public.
This is not word play. The moment you think in publics instead of in people, you start asking a different question as a matter of course: what does this particular public want to hear.
Suppose an installer who splits his customers into three: residents' committees, private flat owners and building contractors. Three publics means three languages and three messages, instead of one message that speaks to none of them properly.
Or take a studio owner who finds she has four publics. One of them, colleagues in her field who send work her way, turns out to be the most profitable, and she has never once approached it directly.
In both cases the product did not change and the budget did not change. What changed was the question of who you are talking to.
The booklet gives this chapter two exercises, one to build and one to analyse, followed by a self-check. From there it moves on to how you find out what each public wants to hear, instead of guessing.
Your customers are not one public. The better you can name each group for what it is, the easier it becomes to know what to say to it.