Part III
How to build an audience profile that goes beyond demographics
I have a problem with demographics. They are useful for describing who people are and considerably less useful for understanding why they do things.
Audience definitions still begin with lines such as: men and women, 25 to 44, urban, above-average household income. Fine. Now what? I know roughly how old they are, where they live and how much money they have. I still do not know what they care about, how they feel about the category, why they choose one brand over another or what might make them change their behaviour.
Demographics make stereotypes easy
Age, income and life stage are easy to understand. Put them together and everybody in the room can immediately picture someone. Unfortunately, the person they picture is often a stereotype.
Say Gen Z and an entire fictional human being appears: digitally native, values-driven, suspicious of traditional advertising, desperate for authenticity and probably ordering something from the other side of the world because TikTok suggested it. Some of those things may be true for some people. The problem begins when the label starts doing the thinking for us.
The same happens with Boomers. Apparently they all struggle with technology, watch linear television and wait patiently for a direct-mail catalogue. Real people are considerably less cooperative.
Averages hide the useful parts
The larger the demographic group, the easier it becomes to describe an average person who barely exists. People aged 25 to 44 include somebody living alone in their first serious job, somebody with three children and a mortgage, somebody starting a company, somebody getting divorced, a marathon runner and someone whose preferred relationship with exercise is watching other people do it.
The age range may be useful for buying media. It does not automatically give you much to work with creatively. I want to understand what connects the people whose behaviour I am trying to influence. That connection may correlate with age. It may have very little to do with it.
Start with the category
How important is the category to people? Do they enjoy choosing? Do they resent having to think about it? Is the purchase exciting, stressful, habitual or almost invisible? Do they know a lot, or would they prefer somebody else to decide? How much risk do they perceive, and what does getting it wrong mean?
These questions start telling me how communication might need to work. A highly involved buyer looking forward to choosing is a different strategic problem from somebody who wants the category to leave them alone. Both could be 34-year-old men living in Hamburg.
Understand situations and behaviour
I want to know when people buy, use, switch or avoid something, and what changes across occasions. Category entry points, need states, buying situations, availability and habit may be more actionable than a story about somebody's inner motivation.
Someone can be extremely price sensitive during an ordinary weekly purchase and happily ignore price on an occasion that matters. This is why statements such as “our audience is value oriented” make me nervous. Value oriented when? Compared with what? What makes them stop caring about value? What are they willing to pay more for? The qualifications are often where the strategy becomes interesting.
Include the relationship with the brand
People can behave similarly in a category while having very different relationships with individual brands. Do they know the brand? Trust it? Think it is relevant or meant for people like them? What assumptions arrive with the name before we say anything? What would they miss if it disappeared?
Sometimes the uncomfortable answer is very little. That is useful to know. An audience profile should help explain the situation the brand is actually in, rather than making the brand feel important.
My test is whether I can explain changing behaviour
When I finish reading a useful audience profile, do I understand what causes behaviour to change across situations? Can I imagine why the same person might reject something on Tuesday and choose it for a different occasion on Saturday? Can a creative start having ideas? Can a strategist rule things out?
If all I can do afterwards is describe the audience more accurately, we have probably not gone far enough. The purpose is to make better decisions, rather than to produce a comprehensive biography of a fictional average consumer.
This does not make demographics useless. Age sometimes matters. Life stage can change a category. Income creates constraints. Location and household structure can explain differences in behaviour. I simply would not confuse those facts with understanding the audience.
There is a moment in good audience work where the people stop feeling like a target group and their behaviour becomes understandable. You see the situations, needs and frictions that change what they do. Suddenly there are things you could say, things you should avoid and assumptions in the original brief that look less convincing. If knowing somebody is 32 helps me get there, excellent. If it does not, I would rather know what changes their behaviour.