As I've wondered further from the world of agencies and marketing departments and entered the real world, it's been surprising to me how much 'marketing thinking' has come to dominate the way large organisations look at the world.
It's sad. That bag of assumptions - brand, audiences, messages etc - has become corporate orthodoxy just as the point it becomes least useful.
It's doubly unfortunate because that mindset is often conflated with 'doing digital'. Digital/social/web was often integrated into large organisations as a subset of comms - so it comes loaded with that marketing approach. This was understandable when it seemed like the web was just another media channel for your business, now, when it's obvious that the web should be the entire platform for your business, it's less forgivable.
That's why, when I got to GDS I found the obsession with user needs so refreshing and helpful - not just users, but user needs. That's a big important distinction. One that sometimes gets lost in a warm bath of user-centricness.
If we forget the needs bit then we're just talking about users, which easily elides into audiences, which everyone takes to mean target audiences - which is a whole different kettle of ball games.
An 'audience' is an organisational convenience from a broadcast age. It's a reasonable way of segmenting the world so you can buy media but as a way of actually talking to people it doesn't work. Most good advertising gets round it the same way good art does - by using the specific to illuminate the general, but most advertising isn't good. So you end up with crude panderings like appealing to women by making all men seem like feckless idiots. Or by saying everyone born in a particular decade has a particular way of looking at the world.
People, markets, customer bases, aren't this simple. Mothers are also small business owners, students and firefighters. Segmenting your users into audiences is always reductionist and rarely helpful. Resisting the obvious segmentations gets you briliant thinking like this.
The whole point of 'digital', the very opportunity of it, is that you don't have to segment people like this. They segement themselves by looking for the thing they want to do.
If your primary focus is on user needs then your task is simple - work out the specific thing people are trying to do and then make it as simple and quick for them as possible. Your design, your engineering, your research, your testing are all then focused on making that one thing work.
It becomes very easy to define success and failure, it's easy to iterate and improve and your research and testing goals are clear. You talk to and work with users in order to help them do something. You only need to understand 'who they are' in as much as it provides a context and background to help them do things.
Then, of course, you quickly get to the point where you're serving multiple needs. You'll start to see common needs and patterns, people who do A also seem to want to do B, so you can help them find B easily when they've finished A, you can group those things together.
But, crucially, you're doing it based on the things people actually do rather than your assumptions about how the world should be divided. You just aggregate activities that are commonly performed together.
You can call that a portal if you want (though PLEASE DON'T) but portals are really something else - they're an attempt to deliver marketing messages by aggregating audiences. They're an attempt to graft a broadcast mindset onto a non-broadcast medium. That graft is not taking.
As more organisations realise that the key to long-lasting, commercially pleasant relationships is great digital service delivery - not message delivery - you can expect audience thinking to diminish and activity thinking to increase.