Brands need to prioritize mindset-based targeting to win
With consumers becoming increasingly numb to advertising and attention spans declining, it’s never been more important to understand consumers on a one-to-one basis. This means it’s imperative that brands speak to the right consumer, in the right way, every time. Alix Moore, senior consultant at Capgemini Invent, looks at how to reinvigorate consumer attention.
Capgemini on how brands can create more meaningful connections to consumers and why it's so important.
We can only resuscitate consumer attention by truly understanding audiences and segmenting accordingly. Traditionally, audience segmentation focused on demographics, but this is only one small piece of the larger audience segmentation puzzle. Brands need to go beyond this to understand their audience on a deeper, individual level.
Brands need to target their audience based on who they actually are, rather than who they think they are. Christina Spears Brown, a professor of developmental and social psychology, says ‘if you use gender as your metric, you won’t see what they’re actually interested in’. This means segmenting audiences based on mindsets, rather than just their physical and geographical characteristics. Audience segmentation is evolving, and brands need to utilize first-party data to embrace it quickly.
Demographic targeting is lazy
Over-relying on demographic targeting is too simplistic. Take gender. It makes assumptions about: (1) what men and women want; (2) who they are. This approach favors blanket, mass targeting, rather than delivering specific, personalized experiences.
Bic released a pen especially ‘For Her’ which was ‘designed specifically for their tiny, fragile hands’ and only came in pastel colors. Kantar’s ‘Getting Gender Right’ report states that 45% of consumers think women are still being portrayed inappropriately. The Bic example shows that targeting audiences based solely on stereotypical constructs of age and gender miss the mark. It’s outdated and misleading.
Assumptions can alienate your audience and lose their trust, which is difficult to get back. Acknowledging people are more than their age and gender is vital. Instead, brands need to focus on who their audiences are as people and target them based on their interests, motivations and values.
First-party data is your most precious marketing asset
Before you can segment your audience in this way, you need to get your data in order, to capture, analyze and leverage it effectively. First-party data is the key to unlocking richer insights about the consumer, to build a personal relationship with them.
This can be achieved in three key stages:
1. Collection: The more first-party data a brand has, the more effectively they can drive a deeper understanding of how consumers behave and what they want. For example, it sheds light on the steps they take prior to conversion, providing key insight on how to influence the consumer journey.
2. Integration: Gathering this data isn’t enough though. The data needs to be integrated across platforms into a centralized place so marketers can draw insights. This moves away from fragmented data sources in unusable formats, towards automated and efficient data collection in one place. Brands can then stitch together their consumer profiles to form a single view of the consumer. They can then develop a holistic understanding of what makes their consumers tick.
3. Activation: This data then needs to be activated in real time, to react dynamically to a consumers’ interaction with a brand. Implementing campaign management dashboards will enable the optimization of this performance to supercharge results.
If brands get this right, they’ll be able to utilize their first-party data to its full potential and understand:
- Consumers’ interests and values
- Consumers’ motivations behind their buying decisions
- How to connect with them on an emotional level
- How they think and how they want to interact with brands
And it’s these personality- and belief-focused insights that need to power audience segmentation.
Nike does this brilliantly using mindset segmentation to break down a consumer’s relationship with sport. They speak differently to those that play, watch or just talk about sports. Every campaign is about creating a community and a feeling of belonging to their tribe.
This focus on mindset targeting is becoming increasingly important as they categorize themselves into more granular interest groups. This type of segmentation enables brands to deliver more personalized experiences which will improve customer loyalty, retention and increase ROI.
Mindset-based targeting is the key to building meaningful consumer relationships
Brands need to build meaningful relationships with their consumers to connect with them on an emotional level. To do this well, they need to develop a deep understanding of their values and beliefs and use this insight to target them. Brands need to gather this information about their audiences by utilizing first-party data to its full potential and activating their comms in real time.
Only once this powerful equation of mindset-based targeting and structured first-party data is established, can brands deliver the nirvana of a truly personalized experience for their consumers.
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