#5 Who are you making creative for?

Understanding your customers is key to delivering strong performance. Who they are, what motivates them, what they like & don't like, how to reach them and all that fun stuff. But are you using this information to develop your work? Or just making creative that you like? 

This blog is less about how to identify your audience and more about what to do [or not do!] once you have.

So, a few quick assumptions to set the scene;

• You’ve got a well-developed market or customer segmentation
• You know who you want to target and what is important to them
• You might even have some snazzy customer segment names and pen-pics which manage to put lots of people into some pretty broad buckets

Important side note: If you don’t have any of this and don’t understand who is buying your products and why, or who you want to target with your products and what is important then it’s probably best to start there.

I’m going to talk about a couple of challenges I see with customer segmentations and making decisions off the back of them.

#1 They should be directional NOT gospel

By their very nature, bigger market wide models group people into pretty large segments. Sure, there are some important similarities that determine the groupings [these can be behavioural/attitudinal/demographic depending on the type of segmentation] but they have to be broad to avoid having millions of them*. Quite often there aren’t major differences in where different segments under and over-index on certain things, so in reality, there is likely to be a fair amount of cross-over between segments. There are also plenty of challenges of actually reaching your segments through media audiences.

*For reference, the more recent market wide segmentation models I’ve worked with have divided the UK telco market [basically the entire population] into 6 broad groups based on attitudes.

The danger is that these broad segments can be used to make some pretty sweeping decisions which might not be the best approach– like Segment A definitely like buying online the most so let’s massively change our media buying or Segment B need more information before they make a purchase so let’s change our order journeys.

Obviously develop your plans with your audience in mind but be prepared to monitor closely, to test & learn and optimise based on the data and results you are seeing. Ultimately you are trying to improve business performance so you’ve got to be led by the actual results you are seeing.

This also helps negate an element of the ‘research factor’ where people don’t quite do everything they say they would when asked in market research.

 #2 Customers can get forgotten in decision making forums

It is all well and good knowing about your customers and prospects and using this information to shape what you do. But don’t let it all get thrown out of the window when it comes to the big decisions and sign-offs.

Everyone has an opinion on marketing; what you should say, what the ads look like, what music you should have - but how much should these opinions influence things? Sure, your Marketing Director and CEO are going to have an opinion on the next TV ad campaign. Lots of other people too no doubt, but why go to all the effort of understanding your audience to make an advert for your CEO instead?

In my previous role, we found that only one or two of the marketing team actually fit into our target customer segment. None of our Leadership team did, so we had to take their opinions on creative with a pinch of salt. It was vital that we engaged our actual target customers throughout a process like making a new TV advert.

Testing various concepts and ideas, reviewing the message takeout, engagement levels and impact on feelings around the brand. This was as close to proper evidence as we could get before making an advert and was key in [hopefully] making the right decisions more often than not. It was my responsibility to use all of this insight to give people in the business the confidence we were doing the right thing – particularly in cases where they personally preferred a different concept or message.

This becomes more difficult the further away your key stakeholders are from your customers as there is a real danger that you make changes to concepts based on what they think is important, rather than what is actually important to the people who really matter.

There were definitely times where we had some pretty strong conversations on these topics – earlier in my career to make sure I wasn’t making an ad just for me and later on with me taking the good fight back to the business the other way! [Shout out to Zaid Al-Qassab for challenging against or fighting with me in lots of those conversations.]

Be true to your creative and your audience and make sure it isn't watered down by input from lots of stakeholders along the way. If you let this happen then you'll end up with far less effective work at the end. Know where you can compromise without breaking the idea and where you can't and be prepared to fight your corner!

There’s a broader point about overall diversity of thought in marketing and advertising and how much more value can be added by having greater diversity but that’s probably a whole other blog!

How much are you aiming your activity at certain audience groups? Do you make creative tailored for them, for what you like best, or for your CEO?

Chris.

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