The Jeff Bezos Strategy: How to Use an Ideal Customer Avatar

Are you spending a lot of time and money on marketing, and you’re still not getting the customers and clients that you want?

Hey, let’s talk about that.

Let’s talk about building the correct and ideal customer avatar for your business. Because let’s be honest…

Without customers, you have no business. For Episode 311, we are going deep into why your current messaging might be falling flat and how to fix it by targeting the right people, because we ain’t got time for that (you know what I’m talking about).

Let’s focus on three major things:

1. The Goal: Stop trying, hoping, and praying that the right people will magically stumble across your business.

2. The Execution: Speak directly to your audience’s deepest pain points.

3. The Payoff: Provide an irresistible offer they can’t say no to.

Watch the full episode here.

My Mistakes Cost Me Time and Money (Don’t Repeat Them)

Let’s start with my own mistakes. I’ve been there. In the past, I spent a lot of money on swag, merch, and random products, hoping it would bring high-ticket clients through the door.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t. I had to learn the hard way. My ideal customer wasn’t looking for a cool t-shirt or a branded pen. Even though my swag is fire, it won’t bring in customers.

NDUB’s ideal customer avatar is someone who has already invested money into templates, complicated systems, or talking-head influencers, and it’s simply too much for them to handle. They are overwhelmed, tired, and need to make money.

As a fractional CMO, that is exactly where I step in. My clients usually tell me exactly what my client Crystal said: “Nathan, just tell me what to do.” That’s my job. But for years, I didn’t talk about it explicitly. I’m talking about it now.

If you remember a couple of episodes back, I mentioned that Amazon spends $14 billion on advertising for one specific reason- to get to the right person. Your budget doesn’t need to be $14 billion — heck, you can start at zero — but your content and digital landscape must target a specific human being.

When Scott Shockney and I talked about SEO vs. GEO, we emphasized that search engines care about context. AI search cares about relevance. If you aren’t relevant to a specific person, you are invisible- and you’re not the focus.

The Business Model Canvas Starts with the Customer

Have you ever looked at Strategyzer’s Business Model Canvas? Most people assume it reads left to right, but it doesn’t. It actually begins with two foundational pillars:

1. Customer Segments

2. Value Proposition

Too many founders and business owners start by obsessing over their value proposition. They want to talk about their solution, their cool benefits, the trinkets, the lights, and all the “cool stuff.”

But your customer doesn’t care about your process or your shiny features. They just want to know: “How can you help me solve my problem?” They care about the WIIFM—What’s In It For Me?

The Jeff Bezos “Empty Chair” Strategy

How do you make sure you’re focusing on the customer segment? You use the Jeff Bezos rule. Leave an empty chair in the room. In high-level Amazon meetings, Bezos would leave a chair completely empty to represent the most important person in the room, the customer. Every decision made by the executives had to satisfy the person sitting in that invisible chair.

If you aren’t actively visualizing your customer avatar when creating content, writing copy, or building offers, you are talking to an empty void. Big brands understand this intimately. I even went to Gemini AI and asked, “How do big companies target me?” It broke down exactly how the giant software companies do it.

Take a look at how HubSpot and Mailchimp frame their buyer personas:

In their foundational growth years, HubSpot openly shared whether to target Owner Ollie or Marketing Mary. They chose to focus entirely on Marketing Mary to streamline their messaging. That single choice allowed them to scale into the tech giant they are today.

Speak Directly to the Pain, Then Make the Offer

Whether you run a B2B (business-to-business) SaaS (software-as-a-service) company or a local grab-and-go restaurant, you have to speak to the immediate psychographics of your avatar.

If you run a food spot, you shouldn’t just talk about how you “picked the ingredients with love and care.” Talk to the worker on a 30-minute lunch break who is starving, short on cash, and needs something quick they can eat with their hands without needing a fork, spoon, or knife. Hit them with a BOGO (Buy One, Get One) or an everyday low price right when they are hungry.

When you speak directly to their immediate pain and put out an offer that makes practical sense, it becomes impossible for them to deny.

Stop trying to attract clients through osmosis. It doesn’t work. Get feedback from the market. If someone doesn’t buy from you, ask them why. Was it the packaging? Was it the promotion? Use that real-world data to refine your avatar.

What’s Your Empty Chair Story?

My biggest failure was when a dream client looked at me and said, “Nathan, I would love to work with you, but I just didn’t know what you did.” Don’t let your messaging hide your talents. Drop the expensive merch, ditch the generic content templates, and start building your empty chair effect. Talk to real people- not just an LLM.

If you are a business owner looking for someone to cut through the noise, clear the clutter, and take your marketing strategy to the next level, let’s connect.

Schedule a FREE strategy session.

It’s time to move from surviving to thriving.

If you need help, hit me up.

Nathan A Webster, MBA

Founder, NDUB Brand of NW & Associates, LLC