Co-founder, Rachel Clarke, (once the Queen of Personas, back in the day) muses on the changing face of audience definitions and charges us with considering whether it’s time to revive our interest in deeper audience insight.

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The need to keep understanding your audiences

I’m currently preparing to moderate some sessions at Mediatel’s Future of Brands conference at the end of April and one of the areas I’m digging into is approaches to developing consumer insights.  A  question that has come up is why brands “today” are so keen to understand and reach their audiences.

It’s not a new topic of course: brands have been keen for decades but it caused me to pause and reflect that how they express and act upon this need has certainly changed over time.

“For brands, being able to tap into this type of research on an ongoing basis is especially important for situational changes, where things switch or flip based on shifting social and cultural environments; Covid, cost of living crisis, war, climate changes…”

Back in the mid-2000s, my then employer sent me on a week-long course in how to develop personas, using qual and quant research. Digital usage by FMCG brands was relatively restricted at that point, with a low number of channels (…even if every year was going to be the year of the mobile 😃), so a lot of what was covered about channel usage had been the same for a while, and a lot of what brands needed to know about reaching their audiences had been known for a while and was slow to change.

The arrival of Web 2.0 and the explosion of digital usage – the democratisation of access and ability to create web – meant audiences’ attention was being split. This in turn meant the known situation changed rapidly (and that not all brands kept up with the changes).

In my experience, the use of personas and profiles started to decrease: a removal of richness of audience understanding. The growth of digital and especially social channels led to a rapidly expanding pool of data sources. Things got a LOT more complicated and for a variety of reasons, a consumer persona seemed to become more a pure data-driven segment, without some of the underlying behavioural and motivational information.

Looking at how we classify the three main types of profiles, we shifted to an environment with Profiles and Segments, but far fewer Personas.

• Profiles: used to develop strategic and creative platforms
• Personas: the hows, whys and whats about the audience, informing decisions about comms messaging
• Segments: data driven targets for media and comms, information where messages go and how they should be delivered

One reason for these changes can be cost: traditional qual research is not cheap. If the comms environment changes quickly, justifying more expense can be hard when you already have so many choices to make regarding what you are going to create and where you will put it.

However, the challenges of digital also bring opportunity. There’s a massive data lake available for brands to understand aspects of their audiences (whilst maintaining privacy for them). Alongside this  are more tools and opportunities to explore the hows and whys, many of which  do not need in-depth, long form research panels organised by the brand.

Analysis of social content is one way of understanding consumers (although this is a self-selecting audience as who they are, and what they say is crafted for a public environment). There are also far more companies offering digital solutions to qual research, whether this is set up for your questions or delivering ongoing audience surveys and insights. For the latter, you have long-standing companies such as Kantar being challenged by newer entries, such as Kids Insight (disclosure – this was set up by an ex-colleague of mine).  

For brands, being able to tap into this type of research on an ongoing basis is especially important for situational changes, where things switch or flip based on shifting social and cultural environments; Covid, cost of living crisis, war, climate changes. Information acquired at these times needs to be overlaid on to the core behaviours that may be part of your profile. The switch in messaging at the start of a pandemic is an example of this:  the strategic and creative platforms tended to stay the same, the messaging changed. 

Pulling back to what this means for you – the question you need to ask is “how you are getting this information into your decision-making process?”.  Are you relying on research that was conducted years ago, supported by what you can get from quant data sources, or do you have access to ongoing qual information to really understand what matters to your audiences now? If not, how can you or your agencies get this information?

One more thing, remember what I said about Web 2.0 – about democratisation of access and creativity – the same messages are being said about Web 3.0. But today, there are a lot more people ready to maintain the fight for this and challenging how this is being developed. We’ll be talking more about this in future episodes.