Granular “Micro-Precincts” And The Marketer
Posted on | August 24, 2008 | 2 Comments
by Andrea Learned
Whether you are a Gen X, businessman, parent of two grade school kids or a single, female, dog-loving Boomer, you’ve likely come across an ad that was targeted directly at you but completely missed the mark. How does that happen?
Marketers will always fail when they work from a blanket-style hope that “all men/women/children everywhere” will respond to a given pitch. Instead, a brand can only get beyond a homogeneous diluted campaign by dialing in to the complex beings it strives to serve.
Complex is, after all, who we are as people and as consumers. This is perhaps even more the case for the future if what John Zogby writes in his new book, The Way We’ll Be, is true. Just what might that increasing consumer complexity mean for forward-thinking marketers? The New York Time’s Janet Maslin quoted Zogby on this topic in her recent book review:
Traditionally, marketers have been focused on segments like: “women,” “men,” “Boomers,” and “homeowners” etc. But, each of those is so broadly inclusive that any more significant commonalities among members gets lost. While gender, for instance, may indeed be a helpful segmentation tool, what more might we learn about a consumer at the granular level? Is he/she a green-living, socially conscious, dog-loving, parent of grade school kids who loves to ski and garden? Micro-precinct style exploration would seem to offer more clues about how a brand can become relevant to the complex consumer (and help him/her think “that’s me” when they see the brand’s ads).
Interestingly, if marketing to women is your task, you have likely long been using this sort of granular process to tap the minds and buying habits of your female customers. In fact, “marketing to women” is not what any of you actually do. Rather, marketing to a very specific micro-precinct of people who may tend to be female is.
Any brand that has been using the micro-precinct approach (even without knowing Zogby’s term) has already been putting itself at the center of passionate conversations about the issues/problems its products might be a part of solving. Such brands have realized that when they do what they do, and well, their very unique and interconnected, action-oriented customers will do the rest.
It makes sense that the longer a person lives, the more granular their views, interests, passions and understanding of themselves (and reflection thereof) become. This certainly influences the ways a consumer thinks and buys over the years. The interesting thing to note for the Millennial generation, however, is that they may already be operating at this “granular” level, even though they haven’t yet lived that long life. That generation’s completely digital world experience has had much to do with speeding them to their more complex inspirations and motivations.
On this group (which he calls First Globals as per Maslin’s article), Zogby sees it this way:
He believes that First Globals see what the other groups do not, and that their lives are public and interconnected in ways that were not possible in pre-Internet times. To hear him tell it, this group will usher in a new era of sanity, substance and citizenship.
It used to be that older consumers “grandfathered” their ways of living/buying into the minds of the younger generations. But, today it seems that the reverse is more likely. Younger consumers, with their “First Globals” perspective, are “grandchilding” their ways of living/buying on up to their parents.
A fascinating and challenging development for marketers, indeed. The opportunities for a brand to interconnect with consumers, on all their granular levels, are immeasurable.
Tags: Andrea Learned > first globals > Janet Maslin > John Zogby > market segmentation > marketing to women
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2 Responses to “Granular “Micro-Precincts” And The Marketer”
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August 27th, 2008 @ 6:32 pm
Kudos! Your talking the language of progressive marketing. Connect with their passions and interests to get max messaging impact.
On another note if you want to see passion in social networking check out ww.IMPnow.com
August 27th, 2008 @ 6:33 pm
Kudos! You’re talking the language of progressive marketing. Connect with their passions and interests to get max messaging impact.
On another note if you want to see passion in social networking check out ww.IMPnow.com