Assignment 18A

Assignment 18A- Create a Customer Avatar

My customer is a married 40-58-year-old white woman from the northeastern US or possibly the northern Midwest. She lives the majority of the year in Florida but maintains a home on the north shore of Massachusetts, and a slope-side condo in Colorado, oh, and the co-op overlooking Central Park.

I say that she is married, because she’s not divorced, yet she makes her decisions independently of her husband, and probably lives the majority of the year away from him. She most likely comes from money and is very well educated, has had several years in a career that she found satisfying, (law), and has grown children whose lives have taken a similar path. True, there’s a trust fund, but her parents were self-made so the work ethic is there. She owns a 10-acre hobby farm in Ocala where she performs all the barn and land maintenance tasks that she feels compelled to. Sometimes she tells her massage therapist how she thinks she really was cut out for blue-collar work, ”I feel so centered when I sweat!” The therapist rolls her eyes knowing that if the work wasn’t so optional, it wouldn’t be so “centering”.

She drives a Range Rover (next year’s), something small, convertible, and foreign, and has a duel wheeled pickup truck with a trailer in tow.

She has some kind of auto-immune condition. Mysterious but debilitating at times.

She loves her horses. She buys horses from Europe through younger Irish or Dutch Bloodstock Agents, former wunderkind prodigies of the jumping world. They see her coming a mile away, overcharge her for unsound horses that she imports and breeds. 

 Soon her farm is too full, she can’t bring herself to sell the young horses or part with the veterans, then one old horse develops laminitis and needs to be euthanized, this is where Equine Memorial Services steps in with the option of Whole Horse Cremation, complete with imported prestige rosewood case for the ashes.

What do I have in common with her? I ‘m a 45-year-old married white lady from New England. I do a load of farm work (not always as centering as one might assume). I have a love for horses in general, yet don’t get quite as attached. I have grown (ish) kids. I am married to an Irish guy but wouldn’t buy a horse off him.

I don’t think this is a coincidence. I have known this woman several times over. I have worked with her, for her (including the massage therapy part). This is who wants to cremate her horse in one piece and keep the ashes in one of her well-appointed living rooms.