Why Big Data is Small Data - Engaging your ideal target market

If you attend an exhibition, or apply for a magazine subscription, or fill out a form you are often asked a few simple questions:

1.      Your name

2.      Male or female

3.      Year of birth

4.      Annual family income

5.      Postcode

This is so you can be added to their database of people who are likely to buy something from them. The data is coded and before long the data collectors have valuable information all about you which is categorised into what is traditionally known as a demographic profile.

You have become an A, B, C1, C2, D or E, you are placed in a nominal age range 0-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+ (retired) and you are estimated to have a disposable income <10K, 10-25K, 26-50K, 50-100K, 100K+ (High net worth). And they place you in either the male pot or the female pot. And well…. That’s it.

That’s all they know about you. You’re a B, C1, C2 35-44 year-old living in the south east with a disposable income of 10-25K possibly 60% male and 40% female.

Now I don’t know about you but it doesn’t seem very descriptive to me. In fact, if anything, it is downright insulting to be referred to that way. Yet marketing people and media owners still insist on using this totally useless tool to befuddle brand owners to spend money targeting these profiles in the vain hope that in amongst this “highly targeted” group, pulled out of the big data, some people might be in the market to buy. For almost my whole career, this was the way TV, Radio, Press, Magazines, Posters, Exhibitions and many other media sold their advertising.

Why?

Simply because it enabled them to get you to place a value on your target market whilst they were using your hard-earned profits to provide a medium to all the other people who were never, ever going to buy your product or service.

The digital knowledge economy has changed all that! It has made demographic targeting for marketing purposes almost entirely irrelevant and in fact downright dangerous for your brand.

If you treat me as a B,C1,C2, categorise me as one of only two sexes, assume that because I have a decent postcode a decent disposable income must follow and because I’m between 35 and 44 I’m probably in my first home with two small children, I fear you will be wasting your money and damaging your brand reputation. 

Your big data is now small data.

So what’s the answer?

In 2004, my integrated marketing agency switched to Psychographic Profiling and we’ve used it ever since. Now don’t muddle this up with psychometric profiling, that is something entirely different and whilst it would be wonderful as a targeting tool, you cannot get every prospect to complete a 300-question profile before you try and sell something to them!

Make no mistake, they are trying to do just that by analysing your purchase pattern on your credit card, or your club card, or what you buy on Amazon (other people also bought this), or what car you drive. Those Google Hummingbirds and Facebook algorithms are churning away in the background to ensure you see what they think you want to see.

Big data going small again.

Sure in the numbers game, if you blast enough people you can get enough sales to run a successful business but as buyers, we’ve learnt to reject this. In 1st world economies, buyers are bombarded with around 18,000 marketing messages every day, of which 4,000 are entirely new. Take a look around you right now. Every physical item around you has a logo or message on it. Your senses are not blind to these messages so they’re automatically going into your brain. It’s all part of our scanning the environment, as we constantly monitor our fright, flight, freeze behaviour for survival.

Now try and remember the 18,000 you saw yesterday. What about last week, last month? Gone. Every single one of them. Screened out, deleted. In fact the New Scientist ran an article on how neuroscientists are discussing that dreaming is the deletion process for the brain whilst we are sleeping. There, marketing has made sleep even more important than before!

So if we delete all these messages being broadcast to us daily, why do brand owners still insist on blasting us every day with their new, amazing, state of the art innovation in our toothpaste, perfume or burger. They can’t all think their products are impulse purchases about to be made in the next few minutes surely.

The answer is, of course, to smash our senses 10 times or more and the brain will log it as a pattern and therefore important. So next time we think about it, the brand will be retrieved and we all rush to buy it. That might just have worked 30 years ago but today? Does it make sense to you?

From direct experience, it is clear the power here has switched from the brand owner calling the shots to you and me - the buyer. We decide when we want to buy, we decide what to buy and we decide how we would like to buy.

We can be hungry any time of the day now, we can choose fast food or restaurant quality, we can order online, drive-thru, sit in or even make it ourselves – they used to call it cooking! It can be omnivore, vegetarian or vegan. It can be hot or cold. I can be cheap or expensive. There are so many variants that are not meat potatoes and two veg.

The decision-making process is always the same:

1.      Identify a need, want or desire.

2.      Qualify it to make sure we’re doing the right thing for ourselves.

3.      Seek solutions in a way that works for us.

4.      Contact the seller of the solution and check they can do it in the way we want.

5.      Buy.

6.      Enjoy our purchase.

7.      Tell our friends how good or bad it was.

So our friend, Big Data, has to be able to monitor our when, what and how every second of every day, 365 days a year. Really?

And this is why using functional, transactional data has found itself wanting because unearthing the emotional intelligence behind how people lead their lives on a minute to minute basis is currently impossible. I say 'currently' because those working in machine learning and AI have got this. We are some way away but it is easily conceivable that biometrics and behavioural data will be patterned to provide highly intelligent mapping of every individual and the life they lead. For some this sounds scary, controlling and manipulative, but as we burn our way through the earth’s resources it may well be the only way that business can survive on an ever-increasingly barren planet.

Far smarter people than me are on this right now, so let’s get back to today and your business, your contribution to making things better for us all right now. How can you engage people in this big data noise with all this choice, and so many ways to buy?

We have found psychographics to be a fantastic tool to help us do that because it provides the marketing process with the emotional intelligence it needs to quietly form commercial relationships. It enables you to create messaging that, when found by the buyer, immediately engages them on their wavelength.

A psychographic profile embraces what people think, what they feel, what their experience is of your product or service, what they enjoy, their aspirations, their desires and ambitions are to be in a better place than where they are right now.

By capturing these values in your ideal prospect, you can orientate your messaging in such a way that they will want to buy from you and only you. Because you “get” them.

Now we have worked to a definition of brand since 1999:

Brand is every experience that affects the relationship between a product or service and its buyer.?

The key to brand is relationship and by portraying your brand story in a way that your target market will find engaging is the only way to sell today.

Remember your prospect is looking for you right now and almost entirely online. If you are findable, when they do there’s no second chance to make a first impression.

We buy from people (brands) we like.

Plus

We only buy from people (brands) who are like us.

Research in 2005 by The Communications Unit, a top 200 ad agency, discovered that with the online arena offering so much choice buyers always preferred to buy from brands that matched with how they saw themselves. No longer did they tolerate being told what, when and how to buy by the brand owner. If there was something they didn’t like about a brand owner’s approach they simply continued searching, fondly called “surfing the web” at the time.

As a brand owner, you simply don’t have time to explain why you do it your way. Your buyers want it their way.

So, unless you have big budgets, you have to define the psychographic profile otherwise your marketing will fail.