Segmentations and strategies: how TV audience mix analysis can help service launch
Are you a Content Connoisseur, a Broadcast Binger, or, perhaps, a TV Traditionalist? At Ampere, we divide consumers into one of five types of TV viewer to help simplify some of our analysis. The segments are based not on the TV services people choose, but on their attitudes towards things like technology, social media and content. Different countries have different mixes of each of the segments, by looking at the behaviour of different segments and the mix, we can get an idea of what strategies should work best to engage a specific country’s TV audience.
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Looking at Subscription Video on Demand (SVoD) uptake is one way to gauge this. Broadly speaking, Content Connoisseurs are the most forward-looking, tech-savvy consumers and tend to have higher income. Traditional pay TV subscribers fall into one of two categories: sport-mad TV Traditionalists or Super Spenders. Broadcast Bingers are TV addicts who are a little price sensitive and tend to shy away from pay TV while Digitally Detached consumers are disengaged with both content and tech.
At it’s most simplistic, we would expect high penetration SVoD markets to have a high proportion of Content Connoisseurs who are willing to spend on tech and entertainment and go in search of a wide breadth of content. This holds broadly true for the UK and US, two of the highest markets for SVoD uptake. But outside these two markets, the drivers for buying an SVoD subscription appear to be different, as is the potential consequence for traditional pay TV providers.
The Scandinavian countries have very high SVoD uptake and are moving most rapidly towards SVoD-only as a key segment. Denmark fits the trend, with Content Connoiseurs being the biggest segment among SVoD homes, but the largest segment among SVoD homes in Sweden is the Broadcast Binger. This suggests that SVoD in Sweden is driven by a degree of price sensitivity and a hunger for binge viewing and box sets while in Denmark, it is likely to be related to a desire to compliment or replace traditional pay TV with the ‘latest thing’.
In Spain, Germany and Italy, three countries which have seen some of the highest recent growth in the uptake of SVoD, a huge proportion of customers are Super Spenders. In all three countries, pay TV has always been a hard sell, so SVoD seems to be fulfilling an untapped vein for pay TV. The alignment of the segments on SVoD with those for traditional pay TV in these countries also backs this up
Thus, the drivers that push consumers towards choosing SVoD vary by market. Price sensitivity and tech-hunger fuels the more Northern European markets, pay TV substitution, the Mediterranean markets and a ‘want it all’ desire influences buyers in the UK and US. The ‘one size fits all’ that some SVoD services have been guilty of will not suffice in TV’s longer term future.
