Knowing YOU Better Than Yourself

As a followup to the last post on branding I wanted to discuss new marketing trends that are evolving.  Using demographics as a way to target market potential buyers has been around for decades.  But today, social networks, behavioral data from search providers, and lifecycle forecasting have relegated demographic based marketing to the history bin. 

The demographic marketing model's goal was to amass the most possible viewers to your advertising and convince them that they were just like everyone else in their demo-delineated category.  Businesses marketed by generational statistics - for example to the 80+ million baby boomers. Gen-classification marketing was easy and effective - but it is now passe !

Like so many things in a digital world, from television programming to  tweeting, fragmentation is the new marketing God.  With social networks and on-line purchasing, consumers self-select into groups so fragmented that no all encompassing demographic based marketing model based upon gender, age, race, or other trait is of any value.

Psychographics is the new marketing religion. It target markets based upon  each consumer's behavior and lifecycle.  Amazon has been a pioneer in psychographic marketing. It invented the "recommended products" and the "users like me also bought" sales techniques. It mines and granularizes previous purchases and search  data on users and predicts what they are most interested in and apt to purchase in the future.

What enables psychographics to be such a powerful marketing tool is the myriad of data and personal information gathered on millions of people worldwide.  Social profile data, behavioral data, and lifecycle data is available for individualized marketing.
Social Networks
All of the data fields that users fill in, as well as, those where permission for use is granted can be used to determine: relationship status, interests, occupation, level of education, etc. etc.  Facebook user information can provide invaluable marketing information on, not only, intent to purchase but what a user may be likely to purchase.

Behavioral Data
Most of the current web based advertising follow consumers around but don't really target them.  In the future, users' web behavior: which sites do they visit, what information are they searching for, what are their purchasing preferences will be used in tandem with the aforementioned social profiling data to super boost the sales process.

Lifecycle Data
Social profile and behavioral data can be used to predict consumer lifecycle as well.  Key purchases like, buying college text books or maternity clothes, a change in a shipping address, buying upscale kitchen appliances, indicate lifecycle  changes and provide companies opportunity data.

Knowing You Better Than Yourself
Broad-based demographic supported marketing is morphing into individualized socially based marketing.  Predicting your purchasing preferences and needs before you know them will become the new normal of product and service marketing.

Best
Jim Lavorato