Still using customer Avatars? Think again if you want to improve performance of your marketing

If you have ever had a marketer spend time helping you create an elaborate personality profile of a potential customer for you (sometimes called an Avatar or Customer Profile) then it might be time to rethink your profiling to improve brand performance. It was a fashionable approach some time back and was all centred around demographic profiling like age, gender, occupation, location, whether the person was white collar or blue collar, and also captured status and salary levels. Sadly, this is actually creating stereotypes in marketing, falsifying sales results and limiting brand growth (most likely).

Think for a moment about the typical customer Avatar that talks all about this one person and defines them like this - Jane Blogs works in Inner London, has a great job working in a professional services firm and earns £80,000 a year. She is mid 30's. Imagine if you are targeting Jane as a travel company for example. The travel company spends a great deal of media money targeting Jane wherever she goes online and she sees plenty of travel ads all day. What if half of the Jane's out there were a home body and loved to decorate and renovate and had no interest in travel at all? That's an awful lot of media dollars down the toilet.

Even if some of the audience were just like Jane and liked to travel, the sales results report strongly that people like Jane are buying the product. That perpetuates the idea that Jane is the core market in a self fulfilling loop. The truth is that no one else is buying, because they haven't been targeted in the media, so the sales results are skewed from the beginning. The sales team then go to the marketing team and demand more marketing to their 'core audience' and the cycle perpetuates.

Tourism Australia improves performance by 300% by dropping their Avatar

There are much more effective ways to target your potential customer. Australian Tourism did this very thing to improve their sales results by 300% (this is not published but was shown to me personally by the Chief Marketing Officer a big industry conference so I know it is real). Instead of targeting Jane, above, they targeted anyone and everyone who had an interest in adventure travel. Australia is considered adventure travel, by the way. So, here we have a very targeted audience by the things they care about, the values they hold, the interests they have and not by their age, gender, income or any of those superficial things. Results were unprecedented with this shift.

Netflix improves targeting by Taste Communities

This is not the only way to segment now with many brands choosing small niche groups that they call 'Taste Communities'. Like Netflix for example, they have a clear idea of the types of interests that their users have and can target by these tastes and cross align their programming that suits that audience. There is no specific pie based on age or gender or any other biased criteria and purely on interests which is commendable. This especially works well in their own platform and with their own segments. User activity in the digital space is a sure fire way to see who is doing what. Not as easy outside a controlled environment like this.

Caution with Psychographic profiling

Some psychographic segmentation is targeting people by values, but they are often established and stuck in certain pots made up by the media channels who have something to sell to you. Targeting certain groups by calling them 'The Grey Nomads' for example, sets the fur up on the back of my neck as it is equally polarising and defining people by their age or other protected characteristics unnecessarily. Care can be taken though and this is a big step better than using straight demographics (like with Jane above). Just because the media businesses target this way, doesn't make it right. Beginning to question your audience segments is the key.

Some smaller businesses don't have the luxury of in-house strategy planners nor have access to the safest and most effective way to target their business. You need a progressive strategist to debunk some of the old bad habits of the marketing industry on auto-pilot. Many in the industry have been working the same way for some time and don't even think to question it. New workers in the industry can also just assume that the status quo is 'right' and adopt the same-same approach without questioning. Clients too will defer to their agencies or marketing consultants without questioning.

You may be skewing your sales data and creating more bias, while limiting your potential growth

A big warning sign that the targeting for your audience could be out of date is the creation of a customer profile that involves gender, age, racial background, socio-economic bias amongst others. These biases are perpetuated and the data in sales seems to make everyone believe they are real too. Looking back at sales data from the past was based on the media activity, the creative that has been produced and the societal influences of the past as is not necessarily capturing the future potential of the new audience that could be available for that brand.

Advertising agencies are slow to adopt new things - now proven by the Group Cohesion Index

Harry Guild, Senior Strategist and editor at BBH Labs, UK in an interview with Suits&Sneakers.TV talks about the Group Cohesion Index as an alternative segmentation approach. Ben has a background in data and analytics and thought there had to be a better way than targeting customer segments and went as far as calling the current generational categories of Millennial and Gen Z type segments as accurate as astrology. There are conflicts, paradox, in all the predictions made about these generations and that makes it difficult to accurately target. BBH Labs came up with a new measure based on single-mindedness and called it the Group Cohesion Index. Targeting groups of people by what they care about seems far more accurate than what year they were born. Harry discusses how to get more targeted with your customers using the Group Cohesion Index (and reveals the nasty truth about where the advertising industry sits on the spectrum to by the way!)

Begmentation - Behavioural Economics segmentation

A really interesting approach to segmentation was raised by Bri Williams, Behavioural Economist. Bri refers to "BEgmentation" and in her own words quoted on Smart Company, explains "In BEgmentation, behavioural economics is the starting point, with each principle applying across the board. It’s an opt-out model, where every principle is assumed to be in play unless there is a good reason for it not to be.

Segmentation is the layer on top, where a more nuanced view of your audience can be developed. That means you could explore how segment one is impacted by messages framed differently, or how the same message impacts segment one and two differently, for example.

The key here is to start with BE so you know the foundations of how behaviour is influenced. If you start with segmentation, you end up having to repeat the process of working out whether a difference between groups is unique to them or something that affects all (in other words, a universal principle).

It’s a bit like the difference between baking a large cake and icing it all at once, or making multiple cupcakes and icing each individually. That would be so much better than piling all those content shows into boxes that belong to Avatar profiles. This is only going to happen if the industry pushes the envelope and push the traditional media channels to do things differently".

Start with questioning. No more auto-pilot.

If any traditional media people want to share some good practices going on at the moment, please do! In the mean time everyone can do their part to at least question the Avatar approach and ask what possible harm could come by creating polarised boxes for people to live in based on demographics.

This brilliant ad from Netherlands for network TV2 says it all so perfectly I think... check this out:

If all else fails, let's connect you up with a strategist who is ready to break these old habits. Just ask me. :)