Defining the ICP

Okay, we've now understood our product deeply.

The next step is to define the ICP.

We're at the second step in crafting core value prop:

Understanding the product
Defining the ICP
Defining the market and JTBD

The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) represents the type of customer who would benefit the most from your product or service, is most likely to buy, and is most likely to be satisfied. Understanding your ICP helps you direct your marketing efforts effectively, tailor your messaging, and build stronger customer relationships.

Understanding ICPs for a B2C business

To create an effective ICP, you need to identify key attributes that define your ideal customer. For each brand, these attributes may vary, but generally include:

Behavioural Traits: Purchase habits, product usage, brand loyalty, etc.
Psychographics: Interests, lifestyle, values, motivations, etc.
Pain Points and Needs: What problems do they face that your product solves?
Goals: Identify the functional, social, financial, and personal goals they aim to achieve by using your product.

Note: These are the most common attributes, but might not be relevant for each product. You need to think what are the attributes that are important for your product. For eg. if acrobat viewer would be making it's ICP, gender won't be a relevant factor, hence it won't consider gender in it's ICP attributes.

Apart from this, also see where does your product fit in your ICPs life, and try to gain more context about their behaviour around that part of their life.

For eg. Airbnb would try to gain more context around how people travel and vacation. What do they look out for, how do they make travel decisions, what are their points of consideration, how long do they travel for etc

ICPs goals

Every product has 4 goals that it fulfils:

Personal goals: These are related to individual satisfaction, well-being, or a sense of achievement.
Functional goals: The practical, problem-solving needs that your product fulfils. These could include improving efficiency, saving time, or solving a specific pain point.
Financial goals: Customers may have financial objectives such as cost savings, getting value for money, or making an economical choice.
Social goals: The desire for social recognition, status, or approval.

Goals	Example
Personal Goals	Airbnb taps into personal goals by allowing customers to feel more connected to local culture and experience authentic living while travelling.
Financial Goals	Dmart: Buying from dmart fulfils financial goals as it provides an cheaper alternative to buy general household items.
Social Goals	Rolex: Purchasing a Rolex watch fulfills a social goal by offering recognition, status, and social approval, signifying success and wealth.
Functional Goals	Slack: The functional goal is to streamline team communication, improve productivity, and make remote collaboration more efficient and accessible.

Understanding ICPs for a B2B business

For B2B businesses, defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) involves identifying the type of company that will benefit the most from your product or service. Here are the steps to figure out your ICP for a B2B business:

Define the Firmographics: Industry, company size, location, stage of growth, valued features etc
Define the usage: Usage characteristics, usage frequency, recency of use case etc
Identify the Business Challenges: Understand the specific pain points or challenges these companies face that your product or service can solve.
Determine the different persona in buying journey: In B2B, there are a lot of people involved in the buying journey, such as
- Influencer
- End user
- Blocker
- Decision maker
  For your target company, try to understand the job roles of who these different personas could be

Figure out ICP persona goals

Your buyer personal will most likely have 3 goals: functional, financial and personal goals. Try and understand how your product fulfils each goal

Goals	Example
Functional Goals	Improving operational efficiency, reducing errors, or increasing productivity
Financial Goals	Cutting costs, increasing ROI, or enhancing profitability
Personal Goals (of decision makers)	Gaining recognition, career advancement, or reducing personal workload

But you should not focus on all goals at once. Prioritising the goal(s) you want to solve for is important to stay focused + drive impact. But how do you select which goal(s) to pick?

Product - Goal fit framework

Follow these steps to understand the product - goal framework:

List Product Features and Benefits: Start by listing all the key features and benefits of your product. Clearly differentiate between features (tangible aspects) and benefits (what customers gain).
Map Features to Customer Goals: For each feature, map it to one or more of the four customer goals. For example, if your product has a feature that saves time, it would fit under a functional goal.
Map these features and goals to the core value prop: The goal you want to prioritise is very closely related to the core value prop of your product.
For eg. Airbnb might want to tap into personal and financial goals for it's users, because it helps them connect to the locals better at a cheaper price

In this section:

You need to do the following:

Understand the different ICP attributes relevant to you product
Speak to atleast 5 customers to understand the ICP attributes and goals
Based on each of your conversation, fill out the ICP table
From all the goals you've listed, prioritise the one using product - goal fit framework

Note: ICP tables and framework are just to get you started. Please feel free to use it according to what works best for your product.