Since the earliest days of marketing, strategies have been built on the same core idea. Use market research to find out what age, income, gender, political affiliation, race, you name it, your target audience was. The industry was under the assumption that knowing who someone was demographically would solve the problem of how you’d get them to buy your product or service.
But somewhere between the rise of the internet and the fragmentation of culture that is happening right now, that logic began to decay. Gone are the days when we used that irrelevant info, because the truth is a 49 year old in Nebraska and a 20 year old in NYC share the same podcast they listen to, reels they watch, political leanings, gym they go to, and so on and so forth. And if that tells you anything, it’s that there is a good chance they share the same reasons to buy something.
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Demographics vs. Daily Behaviors
When you start out with a new project, don’t think about the demographics. Ask yourself what their day is like, what apps they use, do they drive or walk, any kind of question that would be relevant about where you put the ad and what the content of it is.
This isn’t an original thought, it’s simply taking a page from the way social media platforms work. They don’t organize people by demographics, they study your behaviors. Why did your Instagram feed get to be the way it is? They see what you watch, what you like, what you comment on, what you finish, what you scroll past quickly, what you send to your friends and family. Above all, when we start out working on an ad, we need to ask ourselves about our viewers’ tastes. It’s no longer about our audience being “female, 30s to 40s, lives in the suburbs,” it is about whether they care for sustainability, whether they like ironic humor, and whether they like minimalism or maximalism. All these things can tell you a lot more about someone than what year they were born.
Life Stages Aren’t Chronological
Something else of note is that economic pressure has rewritten our lives. There was a time when we would look at groups and go “They’re in college,” or “They’re buying their first home,” or “They’re starting a family.” The industry thought they had it figured out. But the fact of the matter is that someone in their 20s and someone in their 40s may share the same financial anxiety, hustle, skepticism toward certain brands, and many other things. Life is not linear.
Culture Is the Target
Think of it like a Reddit community and all the people who are in the sub for a music artist. They probably have similar beliefs, ways they speak to each other, and aesthetics. You need to ask yourself, do you know the culture or not? A brand that does an excellent job of this is Liquid Death. They surely would have flopped if someone was gatekeeping what creative went out to the public. Instead, they went full force with crude humor and an intense heavy metal aesthetic. Sure, they may have lost some customers along the way by doing this, but the point of it is, if you try to please everyone, you’re going to please no one. They took their understanding of the culture they were selling to and applied it.
When we put an ad out in the world, we need to ask if our audience would sincerely find it cool, cringe, funny, or trying too hard to reference something that came out months ago. All these things done wrong can create distrust, which is the downfall of a lot of young brands that thought they had it all figured out. If you’re a Coke or Pepsi, the weight of your mistakes is not as heavy. But if you are just starting out, the margin for error is smaller.
To wrap things up, we’ll say this; data isn’t less important, it’s just that we need to look for the right things. Let’s look at how a community speaks to each other, what are their emotional drivers, what visuals do they gravitate toward, what are their behaviors? Take a look at yourself, we aren’t just our age, race, gender, or income. We are the choices we make, our fears, our beliefs, our goals, and the communities we are in.
Social media platforms have figured it out, now it’s time for marketing to catch up.