The other day, I received a press release in the mail from a small soap company. The company, which made soap specifically for mechanics and machinists, was broadening its product line to include soaps for other professions or hobbies. The accompanying photo showed an array of soap in different colored wrappers, and there was a soap for hunters, a soap for winemakers, a soap for fishermen, a soap for gardeners and so on.

Impressed with the ability of such a small company to research and develop products with such specific uses, I looked the firm up online. I found the company was selling bars of soap on its Web site, but they weren’t specified as being for any particular profession. Was the company only making one kind of soap and changing the wrappers?

It certainly appeared that way, but what’s wrong with that? The soap obviously is effective for a variety of needs, but instead of marketing it as an all-purpose product for people who literally get their hands dirty at work, the company wanted to make sure its customers knew it could work for them.

There’s a lesson to be learned here for any business that provides a product or service. Sometimes, aiming for the broadest customer base possible isn’t always the best strategy. How would a fisherman know that this soap was great for getting the fishy smell off of his hands unless the soap actually said “for fishermen” on the label? The soap maker isn’t big enough to afford a national TV advertising campaign where a series of smiling fishermen, mechanics and winemakers all rave about how effective the soap is. Instead, the company has achieved the same goal as that imaginary commercial by simply printing up a few different types of labels.

It’s easy to forget that your customer base isn’t a homogenous blob of identical people with identical needs. Some people order from the same pizzeria every weekend because they like the fast delivery, others because they like the sauce. Basing all of its attention on reaching the sauce-lovers does the pizzeria a disservice by leaving the impatient types with little information.

Likewise, the soap maker in the aforementioned tale understood that a fisherman might not think a soap for mechanics would work for him. Rather than lose this potentially huge customer base or make a half-hearted stab at being all-inclusive with its marketing, the company went for broke with the one-soap, different-wrappers approach.

All it takes sometimes is to remember that customers like your company for different reasons and to make sure you’re thinking about all of those reasons. If that means wrapping the same product in different labels, so be it. You might not be able to put the same product in a new box for each one of your customers, but keeping in mind the fact that they look to your company for different reasons might be enough to keep them all satisfied.