Aaron Shields’s Mind Terroir

There is one way that demographics can be used brilliantly. It deals with message segmentation.

In Predicting Marketing Success, Robert Passikoff makes the important insight that across all individuals the same drivers of choice will be present in a category, but different groups will have different order preference.

In other words, suppose you wanted to poll what movie buffs to discover what they think makes a great movie. After the analysis you would probably have four or five reasons stand out. If you looked among different groups of people in the study, you would see a different preference ordering of the attributes. Looking at people with an acting background, you might find that they rating acting as the most important; looking at people with a writing background, you might find that the qualityof the script is the most important.

An individual’s history affects order preference.

Demographics in their ultimate form can give insights into people’s life experiences: the time and the place they grew up and what experiences that would cause them to have.

Using this knowledge you can fine tune your messaging to different groups to reflect order preference for the drivers of choice and drivers of differentiation of your business.

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