EP 26 | Why Your Customer Avatar Isn't Working Anymore and How to Fix It

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In this episode, we dive into the challenges of a failing buyer persona and share strategies to refresh your brand messaging and positioning to better connect with your audience. Perfect for female founders and entrepreneurs aiming to strengthen brand authenticity.

Your customer avatar isn't broken because you did it wrong. It's broken because the internet changed human behavior faster than marketing frameworks could keep up. Age, income, location — none of it tells you what you actually need to know about why your modern buyer buys or why she doesn't.

In this episode, brand strategist Shivani Pandey breaks down exactly why the customer avatar framework is failing female founders in 2026 — and what smart brands decode instead.

If your messaging isn't converting and you can't figure out why, this is the episode with your answer. 

Transcript

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Have you ever noticed that the more detailed your customer avatar gets, the less useful it becomes? So for example, she's 35 year old, she owns a business, she loves coffee, she shops at Target, she listens to podcasts. Cool. But none of these points are telling you why she buys. And that's the problem. For years we've been told that if we just define our ideal customer clearly enough, our messaging will magically click. But what if the framework framework itself is outdated, right? Because today's buyer isn't being shaped just by demographics. She is being shaped by the digital worlds that she spends her time in. The creator she follows, the community she belongs to, the belief she absorbs, the identity she's building. And that's why, exactly why two people who look identical on paper can respond completely differently to the same message. In today's episode, I want to challenge one of the most accepted ideas in marketing and share what I believe has replaced the traditional customer avatar. Because the brands winning today aren't just understanding who their customers are, they are understanding the worlds they live in. So let's get into it. So this is my hot take, okay? Your customer avatar isn't helpful for you to sell anymore. It's outdated, it's done instead. Not because your audience disappeared, but because the internet changed human behavior faster than the marketing frameworks evolved. The version of customer avatars, most of us were taught to build, the pain point identity, all of that was so predictable. Today, a 42-year-old mom might think like a startup founder. A CEO might consume the same content as a college student. Two women with identical demographics can buy for completely different reasons. So if your messaging feels generic, disconnected, or why isn't it converting, the problem might not be your offer. It might be the lens you're using to understand your buyer. Okay, so I want you to think about a few things that I want to take talk about in this episode today. So where did this whole idea about customer avatars came from? Right? Like what happened a couple of years ago that we all started talking about the customer avatars. So the the idea or the marketing template before that was demographics, okay? And I can tell you that because when I was working with big brands, we would have these uh, you know, these marketing agencies pitch us data uh to buy some kind of creative services for them. And you know what their sources would be for that data on how they are looking at the customers? Cable TV and newspaper readership. Literally, that is how they would group people in based on age, gender, income, location, education. Okay, this is the traditional way, even before the whole customer avatar uh ideology came in. It was just these big demographics that were being used for targeting, you know, back in the 2010, 20 up to 2015, if I could, if I can say, because that is the time I was working with these brands, and that is how traditionally they were understood. And then after that, once the social media kind of started building up, we added a layer of psychographics, okay, and that's how the whole customer avatar identity started building in, because we we realized that oh, there's a layer of things like values, interest, lifestyle, personality, um, and and in all of that, what is what are they struggling with? And all our offers and products were aimed with that lens. So that is the background of how uh you know the whole avatar space was constructed. At this time, this worked. Okay, let's be honest, this definitely worked. There was no reason for it not because uh media channels were limited, cultural influence was local, people lived with more predictable social groups. So obviously, this was something that was easier to understand and work with. So your audience's environment shaped their identity. Now, what happened somewhere between 2015 and 2020 is the social media platform broke the model, right? Up till now, social media was only about, you know, initially sharing their personal stories or what they're doing, and but now the power of social media started skipping in. So that is the big insight. Today's buyer is not shaped primarily by demographics, right? They're shaped by digital environments. Uh, things like TikTok, right? Um, Reddit, obviously podcasts, just like this one, newsletters, online communities, the YouTube rabbit hole, let's not even go there. So those are the things that really made this so important for people that people now self-select into belief systems, right? A 25-year-old and a 55-year-old can consume the exact same content daily. A founder in Texas can think exactly like a founder in Singapore. The internet created the social media platforms created micro bowls, and buyers now live inside those holes. So, what I really want any female founder listening to this is that when you're thinking about your audience, remember that people do not no longer buy according to who they are on paper, they buy according to the world they've built inside their minds. So now you want to you want to ask yourself that why do identical avatars buy for completely different reasons? And that's a really fair question. When so much of their demographics and psychographics are common, why are they still buying diff for different reasons? So let me give you an example, right? Two women, same age, same income, same business stage. Traditional marketing says they are the same avatar, but in that's on paper. In reality, it's not that way. One believes visibility creates opportunity, personal branding matters, growth requires being seen. But the other one believes expertise should speak for itself, marketing feels performative, visibility is uncomfortable, right? Same demographics, but completely different buying behaviors. The difference is not demographics, the difference is worldview. And that is the point that we need to understand when we are looking at our customers now. What worlds are they living in? What is their worldview? How is it being shaped by? And the more you understand that, the more you belong in their world. So that is why I want your attention to now move from customer avatars to customer worlds, right? That's the framework that I think is so important for female founders to start learning, to start digging in. Instead of asking who is my customer, ask what world does my customer live in, right? Every buyer has a world made up of a few things. First, their identity, right? Who do they believe they are? Um, are they the underdog? Are they an expert? Are they a rebel? Are they perfectionist? Are they self-made founders and very proud of it? The next thing you want to think about is the desire world. Why are they quietly moving towards, right? What are they quietly moving towards? Not just goals, what transformations are they seeking? For example, are they looking for recognition, freedom, simplicity, status, confidence? These are the things that you have to think about when you're thinking about your product or services. That what transformation are they truly seeking, which is which goes deeper than just, you know, um, I want to lose weight. That's that's just desire. But truly, what what do they what are they looking for? They're looking for confidence because some somewhere that is what they are lacking with their worldview. They feel that losing that weight gives them that worldview of be feeling confident uh in in different aspects of their life. Maybe it's dating, maybe it's um, you know, uh getting a new job and things like that. So this is how deeper you need to go in the desire world. The next thing is their fear world, right? What are they protecting themselves from? Are they they don't want to look foolish, for example, right? They don't want to waste money, they don't want to be judged, they fear failure. Um, success that changes their identity is something that they fear, right? Like, I don't want to be, for example, women who do not like person branding as an idea, is that if they have to do if that is the norm of marketing today, uh, they have to put themselves out there. That is absolutely in in a you know, in a way that changes their personality completely. That's not who they are, and that is uncomfortable for them. So these are things that we must know about our audiences world, otherwise, what are we saving them from with our products and services? What are we helping them to not be or not go in that place, right? And then all of this obviously needs to start building up in the language that you use, either in your packaging or your content or your pitch decks or your partnership uh decks. So what world do they naturally, what words do they naturally use? Your audiences, not the marketing words, their words, the phrases they say in. Uh, for example, your DMs, the sales call, the voice notes, the community discussions. Do you have a track for that? Do you have something that is recording these in daily as you interact with this uh demographics of people, interact with these audiences that you are tracking so that you can actually build your own language through these, through these notes, right? And why most messaging feels generic is how you will crack this, right? Because brands are still speaking to demographics, they are not speaking to words, and this is your competitive advantage to your competitors if you are building this as we talk, as we speak, and you are started working on this very seriously. That you are not just looking at demographics, you're building worlds, right? So I want to give you an example for a generic language that you would use, helping female founders grow their business. Now, in fact, I do that too, right? Sometimes I'm not holier than thou. I am also using language sometimes which is not so world-based. So let's look at an example. If I were to change this for myself, in fact, I want to uh probably say helping women become the obvious choice in the markets that keep overlooking them. This is what I am going for because I want to dig into their desire and fear both at the same time. I don't want them to, I want the I'm digging into the fear of them being overlooked, and I'm digging into their desire of being the obvious choice, right? So that's the difference. The earlier helping female founders grow their business is just like a category. And the other one, helping women become the obvious choice in markets that keep overlooking them, that is an entire belief system. So this is the difference that we want to start building in for our brands. What modern brands actually today need to decode this? The new research questions are not how old is she, where does she live, but start working, start building a deck, start building a Google Doc or Notion page, wherever it may be, about things like what does she believe in, what frustrates her, what does she secretly want? What identity is she trying to become? What language does she use when nobody is marketing to her? That is where your true messaging is going to come from. So I really want to wrap up this episode to say it's a short one, but I wanted to give you some context on why there's something that I'm building for you that is going to help you answer these questions, right? So I honestly feel that the future branding isn't understanding who your customer is, it's understanding the world they live in. Because when you can articulate their world better than they can do themselves, trust forms faster. And trust is what drives every decision, every buying decision. So I wanna really let you in on what I've been obsessing over, uh, this idea for a while now. And after using it insights and client projects, I've realized most founders don't need another customer avatar worksheet, right? They need a way to map their worlds, their buyer worlds in which they live, right? That's exactly what I've been building: a simple framework that helps you decode and unlock your audience's identity world, desire world, fear world, language world. So your messaging sounds like it was written specially for them. It's coming very soon, so stay tuned for that. But if you've ever felt like your content is saying the right things but still not connecting, I think you are going to love what's coming next. So that's it for now. I wanted to leave you with the fact that the brands that win over the next decade won't have the best demographics, they'll have the deepest understanding of human worlds. So with that, I am closing this episode and I hope you really enjoyed it. Please, please uh you know, subscribe for my newsletter because more details are coming in about the offer in the newsletter very soon. So stay tuned and the next one, and yes, she builds, she brands, she becomes the category. Bye bye.