We’ve seen more and more brands ask us to connect them with agencies to carry out pivotal consumer research. With companies keen to get into the mindset of their fans and followers, we take a deep dive into the art and science of understanding your audience.
Gen Z doesn’t drink. Millennials love experiences. Boomers can’t get enough of Facebook. The media loves a nice, simple story about a particular generation – it makes for a good headline and, often, it’s the kind of rage bait that drives traffic. But how true is it?
According to the creative researchers and strategists in the AUFI network, the answer’s complicated.
“Everything is hyphenated, everything is melding,” says Sabrina Cabrera, Senior Strategist at brand strategy and innovation studio TRIPTK. “Lots of genres are crossing over, and a lot of people have different ways of expressing themselves. It’s not clean cut.”
“To a point, demographics are helpful, but we’re losing sight of humans; we’re looking at too much data,” agrees Jordanne Young, strategist and founder of Enid FM – an amplification studio that works with brands going through change. “And we’re not painting a picture of these people and how they live their lives. We contain multitudes, and we are nuanced, and we shouldn’t be boxed in.”
Take Gen Z as an example. You might have been led to believe they’re a generation that cares deeply about the environment and the provenance of things. In actuality, TikTok is full of Gen Z influencers posting clothes hauls, and fast fashion brands are soaring.
“To a point, demographics are helpful, but we’re losing sight of humans; we’re looking at too much data.”
Jordanne Young, Founder and Strategist, Enid FM
“I think life stage, and the truth around that life stage, gets mistaken for generational values,” says Cabrera. “There’s this idea of how rebellious they are, and how they’re always trying to push the status quo – but that’s just being young. Those are ideas attached to growing up and wanting to question things.”
“There are so many contradictions in generational reports because they conveniently lump people together based on a single dimension,” says Kiki Plunkett, founder and Research Lead at consumer research and insights agency Occasional Concerns. “There are multiple factors at play that make the world look different to different people.”
AUDIENCE, NOT DEMOGRAPHICS
“Demographics are, on their own, dead,” is the verdict of Emily Gray, founding partner at International strategy studio Untangld. “It’s such an oversimplified and outdated way to try and capture the motivations, values and interests of a particular audience.”
In fact that word, ‘audience’, has gained a new currency in recent times. To win people over, brands need to play to the crowd by understanding where they are, how they feel and what they believe.
“It’s not just about acquiring new customers,” explains Gray. “A deep understanding of people’s motivations and anticipated behaviours provides invaluable insights – not only for customer acquisition but also for long-term loyalty and retention strategies.”
Failing to take this nuanced approach can have serious consequences. “You risk missing the deeper, more interesting aspects that make your audience unique. This often results in a brand positioning that feels generic, undifferentiated, and ultimately forgettable,” she warns. “Take the infamous Pepsi and Kendall Jenner campaign, for example – it’s a classic case of what happens when brands fail to grasp the cultural and emotional landscape of their audience.”
LAYER IT UP
To get to this deeper level of understanding, brands need to take a multi-layered approach – using demographic information as well as psychographic and ethnographic.
“If you want to uncover richer, more meaningful insights that drive impactful brand and campaign development, you need to go beyond surface-level data,” says Gray. “True differentiation comes from those fringe insights, and you won’t find them unless you take a layered, holistic view of your audience.”
“The most useful target audience definition focuses on psychographic and attitudinal factors over demographics alone,” agrees Plunkett. “I even hesitate to put a photo on a persona or segment, because if someone locks in on that, they might forget all the other people who fall into that category based on their personalities, values, life experiences—not how they look.”
“We just worked with an outdoor brand, where the product people went on hikes with consumers so they could see how the products work in the outdoors,” says Michelle Hum, Associate Strategy Director, Data, at Triptk. “It’s important for the people actually designing the products to really know the consumer. It’s not just about the brand teams, the whole business needs that empathy.”
“I even hesitate to put a photo on a persona or segment, because if someone locks in on that, they might forget all the other people who fall into that category.”
Kiki Plunkett, Founder and Research Lead, Occasional Concerns
GET COMPLEX
And brands shouldn’t be afraid to embrace complexity. For example, as part of some recent work with a British telco challenger brand, Untangld asked customers to write love letters and breakup letters to current and previous providers. “It got people into a totally different headspace, and revealed a great deal about what really mattered when choosing a provider,” says Gray.
Young also encourages companies to be a bit more creative, and even poetic, when writing audience personas and portraits. She compares it to creating a cast of characters in a play; brands need to know the backstory enough, she says, to get an understanding of what’s motivating people, and what might put them off a brand.
“Pick up the phone and ask how a group of people spend their time. What do they do? What does a typical day in their life look like for them? What do they talk about on a daily basis? What are the things they interact with the most? Where do their energies go? That helps paint the bigger picture.
“You’ve got to really court them these days, and you have to get into their mindset to court them,” she adds. “Once you get them, you have to keep showing that you get them, otherwise you’ll lose them. People are fickle.”
WHEN AUDIENCES CHANGE
Brands also have to weather the natural ebb and flow as audiences shift over time – something that Cabrera says can be a sign of growth. Businesses might have built a product to serve one type of customer, but once it’s out in the world, it can take on a life of its own.
“A good case study of this is in the last five years, when we’ve seen outdoor running brands whose intended audiences were people who wanted to run ten miles in under two hours,” she says. “Then all of a sudden you have people wearing the shoes for going to the grocery store.
“When brands understand that, they shift their focus from being very product-driven to seeing themselves in the lifestyle space. And when brands start to see themselves more as lifestyle brands, they can understand what subcultures they can plug and play into to keep that engagement going.”
“It’s not a one and done deal. To understand how people are changing, you build up a core consumer insights team, or a dedicated internal team to be always looking in the external world and transmuting what that means for the brand.”
Sabrina Cabrera, Senior Strategist, TRIPTK
UNDERSTAND, AND THEN SURPRISE
It’s not just a brand’s audience that changes; people’s interests and values are in a state of flux, as are the platforms companies use to connect with those people.
“There’s this constant need for a brand to keep a finger on the pulse of their audience in general,” says Cabrera. “It’s not a one and done deal. To understand how people are changing, you build up a core consumer insights team, or a dedicated internal team to be always looking in the external world and transmuting what that means for the brand, and how it influences things like design, merchandise and strategy.”
Once brands have that depth of understanding, it enables them to go strategically against the grain. “You don’t want to get to the point where everything you’re doing is being dictated precisely by what you think your audience might want,” says Young. “At some point you have to have a point of view. Surprise them.”
Image credits (in order of appearance): work for Marshall by TRIPTK, Cada by Untangld, Hummingway by Enid FM, Bauer by TRIPTK, Dickies by TRIPTK.
