BUSI 4003 Week 2 Single Buyer Customer Profile Example

One Buyer for a Small Pottery Studio: A Thirty-Three-Year-Old Remote Worker New to Asheville, What She Is Really Trying to Solve, Where She Looks for It and Roughly How Many People Like Her Live in Buncombe County

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 4003: Marketing Strategies for Small Business

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

One Buyer for a Small Pottery Studio: A Thirty-Three-Year-Old Remote Worker New to Asheville, What She Is Really Trying to Solve, Where She Looks for It and Roughly How Many People Like Her Live in Buncombe County

Why One Person

Riverbend Clay Studio is a composite community pottery studio in West Asheville, North Carolina, with eight wheels, a kiln room and two instructors. It sells six-week beginner wheel courses, monthly memberships for people who already throw, and one-night date classes. Its owner describes the market as "anyone who likes making things," which is too wide to plan from. This profile describes one buyer the studio could build its marketing around, in enough detail that a reader could recognize her. Every attribute is included because a later decision about the message, the channel or the schedule depends on it.

Who She Is

Jordan is 33 and moved to Asheville from Charlotte eight months ago when her employer, a software company, made her job fully remote. She rents a one-bedroom apartment in West Asheville, earns about $85,000 a year and has no children. She works from her kitchen table from about 8:30 to 5, with a long midday break she usually spends walking. She knows four people in town, two of them through work.

What She Is Trying to Solve

Jordan is not looking for pottery. She is looking for a reason to leave the apartment that is not exercise, a group of people she sees regularly and something to do with her hands after a day of screens. Pottery is one of several possible answers; climbing, choir and a running club are the others she has considered. That matters for the studio because its real competition for Jordan is not other pottery studios but every other way a newcomer can build a weekly routine with other people.

Her constraint is timing. Evening classes compete with cooking and the few social plans she has, and weekend classes fill with families and tourists. Her free hours are midday on weekdays, the one time most studios run nothing.

Where She Looks

She finds activities through Instagram, a neighborhood email newsletter, the bulletin board at her coworking space, which she uses two days a week, and recommendations from the two coworkers she sees. She rarely searches the web for "pottery classes"; she notices them when someone she follows posts a finished mug or when a friend mentions one.

How Many People Like Her

The estimate starts from public figures and narrows with stated assumptions.

Table 1

Estimating the Number of Buyers Like Jordan

Population and commuting figures are 2020 to 2024 five-year estimates for Buncombe County (U.S. Census Bureau, 2025). The studio and the buyer are composite.

The figure is rough, but it is large enough for a studio that needs about 60 course students and 40 members a year. It also shows why the studio cannot win by reaching everyone: a few hundred people out of more than 270,000 residents must be found where they actually look.

What Would Make Her Stay

Signing up once is not the goal; the studio needs Jordan to keep coming after the six weeks end. Three things would keep her. The first is seeing the same people each week, which is why the class cap matters more than the price. The second is visible progress: a bowl in week one, a set of mugs by week six, something she can use or give away. The third is an easy next step, such as a membership that keeps her midday slot and lets her throw on her own. What would lose her is the reverse of each: a rotating group of strangers, slow progress that feels like failure, or a course that ends with nothing offered afterward. These points belong in the profile because they shape the membership offer later in the plan, not only the first sale.

What the Profile Decides

Four decisions follow from this profile. The schedule should include a weekday midday class, since that is when Jordan is free. The message should promise a regular group and an hour away from screens, not mastery of a craft. The channels should be Instagram, the neighborhood newsletter and coworking spaces, not search ads. And the price can be framed against a gym membership or a climbing pass, the alternatives she is weighing, rather than against other pottery studios.

Smith (1956) argued that segmentation means adjusting a product to the needs of a particular group rather than pushing one product at a whole market, and this profile is the first step of that adjustment. Kotler and Keller (2022) describe personas as a way to make segments concrete enough to guide marketing decisions; the test of this one is whether it changes the class schedule, and it does.

References

Kotler, P., & Keller, K. L. (2022). Marketing management (16th ed.). Pearson.

Smith, W. R. (1956). Product differentiation and market segmentation as alternative marketing strategies. Journal of Marketing, 21(1), 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224295602100102

U.S. Census Bureau. (2025). American Community Survey 5-year estimates, 2020-2024: Tables B01001 and B08301, Buncombe County, North Carolina [Data set]. https://data.census.gov/