As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly identify your target customer.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open a document or spreadsheet and gather your product description, price, service area, capacity, business goal, current customers, enquiries, sales and known competitors.
   2. Remove names, email addresses, phone numbers and other identifying customer details, then summarise the remaining customer evidence by type, date and source.
   3. Paste the business facts and evidence into the prompt, including links or summaries for UK market research and clearly labelling anything that is an assumption.
   4. Ask the chatbot to produce the candidate segments, evidence comparison, primary recommendation, uncertainties and three tests using the supplied prompt.
   5. Compare every stated customer behaviour, price point and market claim with your sales records, interviews, survey results and source material, deleting unsupported claims.
   6. Ask at least several existing or potential customers from the recommended segment the proposed problem and buying questions, then record their unprompted responses.
   7. Run the three tests from the response, compare the results with the success conditions it specified, and choose whether to focus on the primary segment, revise it or gather more evidence.

   Prompt

   Act as a practical UK small-business market analyst. Identify and prioritise the target customer for this business using only the information and evidence I provide.
   
   Business:
   - What we sell: [product or service]
   - Price and buying model: [price, subscription, contract or other model]
   - Location and service area: [UK-wide or specific areas]
   - Current business stage: [idea, launched, growing or other]
   - Our capabilities and constraints: [capacity, budget, channels, skills and limits]
   - Current customers, if any: [description and relevant evidence]
   - Known alternatives or competitors: [names or descriptions]
   - Business goal for the next [period]: [goal]
   
   Evidence:
   - Sales or enquiry data: [paste a summary or table]
   - Customer interview or survey findings: [paste findings and sample details]
   - Website, search or advertising data: [paste findings]
   - Other UK market evidence: [paste sources or summaries]
   
   Do not invent facts, customer behaviour, market size or figures. Separate evidence from assumptions. Produce:
   1. Three to five plausible customer segments.
   2. For each segment, the problem, likely buying trigger, ability and willingness to pay, objections, where to reach them, and evidence supporting the segment.
   3. A comparison table using criteria relevant to this business, including evidence strength and uncertainty.
   4. One recommended primary target customer and one secondary segment, with a clear explanation of why.
   5. The assumptions that could change the recommendation.
   6. Three low-cost tests I can run in the UK to challenge the recommendation, stating what result would support or weaken it.
   7. Questions I must answer myself before treating this as a business decision.
   Do not present a made-up persona as a fact, and do not claim that a segment is the target customer unless the supplied evidence supports that conclusion.

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.