Audience Segmentation
Turning one Apollo story into ten conversations that start with the client
The brief
Make Apollo's communication land with pensions, sovereign wealth funds, wirehouses, RIAs and more, when every material led with credentials.
The reframe
Each audience is making a different decision. Keep one positioning, and adapt the emphasis to each audience's pressure and the assumption worth challenging.
My role
Senior Strategist, Prosek Partners
I built the audience segmentation messaging playbook, giving brand and product marketing teams a shared system for who they're talking to and why.
Figures
- $500B
- 10
- 7
- Start with the client reality
- Frame the decision
- Identify the assumption
- Stress-test it
- Introduce the model
- Prove it
- Land the outcome
The full case
- Apollo speaks to more than ten distinct audiences — pensions, sovereign wealth funds, insurance CIOs, endowments, family offices, consultants, wirehouses, broker-dealers, RIAs, policymakers — but was telling them all the same story. Materials led with Apollo's credentials and capabilities rather than the client's reality. One message for everyone meant relevance for no one, and in a category where the quality of communication directly influences manager selection, that was a commercial problem, not just a comms problem.
- Every client conversation starts in a different place: different pressures, different decisions, different definitions of success. A pension trustee asking whether income will meet future obligations is making a fundamentally different decision than a wirehouse platform deciding what earns a place on the approved shelf. The insight was structural, not stylistic: keep one consistent positioning, but adapt the emphasis to each audience's reality — their pressure, the decision they're actually making, and the assumption worth challenging.
- Two tools. A seven-step response framework that moves any client conversation from explanation to decision: start with the client reality, frame the decision, identify the assumption being taken for granted, stress-test it, introduce the model, prove it, land the outcome. And an audience architecture covering ten segments across institutional, wealth, and partners — each mapped on responsibility, pressure, the real decision, the assumption to challenge, and a core message. Underpinning both, six writing principles: the audience comes before us, the client outcome is the story, speak to market reality, challenge assumptions, provide proof at every turn.
- Started by auditing Apollo's existing materials, which surfaced the pattern: credentials-led openings, capability descriptions instead of client outcomes, abstract language where plain statements would do. Mapped the full audience universe from their realities rather than Apollo's org chart. Built the response framework as a thinking tool first — something teams could use to prepare for meetings and adapt in live conversation — then codified everything into a messaging playbook with ready-made copy blocks per audience, so the thinking would actually get used instead of sitting in a deck.
- The playbook plus ten audience copy briefs, then the framework applied to live materials: the wealth sell sheet, institutional and wealth homepages, product strategy deck openings, regional event content, and the EMEA capabilities brochure. Every rewrite made the same move — open with the audience's reality instead of Apollo's credentials, replace abstract language with plain statements of what the client gets, and anchor each claim in proof.