The Audience Analysis

As I start to get older and closer to retiring, I begin to dream about what those retirement dreams consist of. One dream I have is owning a sailboat and sailing around the world. Seeing the world for a decade or so. As I scour the web, whatever I am shopping for I am sure to find a million websites of all kinds of things. This is also true for sailboats. There are many different types of sailboats. The one that caught my eye the most was the website for Balance Catamarans.

Like many sailboat company websites, there are a lot of sailing and boating terms that are not defined. The company is assuming by visiting their website, that you are already well versed in the lingo of boating and in this case, sailing. They also only build catamaran sailboats, making them limited in who would be attracted to their website. There are three major categories when shopping for sailboats. They are performance, comfort/size, and price. The saying goes, you can have two of the three, but not all three. Balance Catamarans have the first two in spades, meaning that the price is high. Considering these sailboats are on the top end of price for their size, you can see how they are after a particular audience of people that can afford the starting price of one of their sailboats of eight-hundred thousand dollars.

One thing that particularly stuck out to me was the fact that their website was only in English with no option to select a different language. The company builds the sailboats in South Africa, yet the company is headquartered in Florida. This drastically limits the audience base to only people that can read English. Furthermore, the website is loaded with videos, from talking about how the company was built, to explaining the options the sailboats can come with. All these videos are in English. Let’s say you used the internet to help translate the text for you, you would still have to be able to understand English to understand all the videos.

To say that Balance Catamarans wants to entice everyone to buy their sailboats is what any company wants, but the truth is that they want people who are looking for big powerful catamaran sailboats that can reach high speeds on water in comfort. Having deep pockets also helps. Look no further than their sales pitch: “Balance Catamarans are committed to building semi-custom, hand-crafted, bespoke yachts of exceptional quality. Our customers are mainly drawn from the ranks of serious voyagers, racers, and explorers. They come to us with a lifetime of experience and appreciate a build partner who is prepared to listen and work with them to fabricate a dream catamaran like no other.”

Reference:

“Balance Catamarans.” Balance Catamarans, https://balancecatamarans.com/.