Down with Demographics

Everything we've been taught about #segmentation was based on a paradigm that people are marbles to be sorted until each group is a homogenous pile that will all respond to the same value proposition and messaging.

That paradigm of thinking has been perpetuated through the B-schools and made commercially popular by advertisers who have made their living off selling the real estate of ad space and broadcast time slots with the abundant supply of #demographics - the easiest to obtain but least useful information about the market. So the majority of businesses today are fixated on driving human behavior based on the date they were born and the bracket of income they match - None of which takes into account how people reach different maturities at different ages and the income is a byproduct of lifestyle.

It took me several painful conversations with market researchers to arrive at the realization: "Segment Moments not Marbles".

From all the behavioral science research of the last few decades the evidence keeps mounting that context and environment is a massively greater force of human behavior than their culture, goals, or even their patterns for decision making. It's empirically true that the same people who are "in the club on Saturday are in the church on Sunday." Add to that the secondary influence of context is who is which you and you get the truism, "people are the sum of their five closest friends." Now we can see that if you were to re-do your segmentation with the goal of driving consumer behavior you had better start with the greatest of all influences - The Moment.

There are many "moments," strung like pearls across the consumer journey. The "search" moment, the "buying" moment, the "use" moment. And mapping all the context, a constellation of cues and influences and environmental factors is what provides the greatest understanding of consumer behavior without even a single demographic. So replacing the idea of a "Persona" with a "Vortex" of time, place and context the 'people' are mere specters that pass through and are temporarily imbued with massive buffs and debuffs that overshadow any intrinsic traits of individuals. Put a typically mousy mother with her child in a threatening situation and see just how 'out of character' she'll become as a straight up lioness ready to put herself in harms way in a split second.

The end goal of Consumer Behavior begins with "Consumer Moments"

• What if you were to open up your consumer profile and draw a red line through every statistic and demographic data point, what would be left that helped explain the behavior of consumers and why they buy your products?
• What if you were to describe the setting of one or two moment when the need of your product arises, what if changed would totally shift the entire context?
• What if you were to list the element in the scene like a playwright to then rank the most prominent elements in the attention span of a person, where empathy then becomes an exercise in imagining what would be in view and what would go unnoticed?

~ For a happy, healthier, cleaner world.