Ask any traditional marketer about her potential marketplace and she’ll bark on about demographics, age, gender and various other segmentation approaches. In fact, most marketing departments would be a little stuck without their (fixed) demographic profiling. We are starting to see a change though. As likeminded people gather around fellow likers communities have been springing up everywhere over the last 10 years and this pace has accelerated recently with the explosion in social media. Social media groups are just that, groups of likeminded people who can be treated as their own profile and therefore communicated to using common themes.
This is enormously helpful as we no longer need to rely on knowing your postcode before we can suggest what products and services you might buy. In fact, that notion just looks plain stupid now despite it still being widely used in traditional marketing. So longer do we see groups of 17-24 year olds or C2 demographics or single mothers or people living in EH13 postcode. Now we see people across all spectrums who share a love of cars, dark humour, 1980’s gadgets, rambling etc. This is going to make our life as marketers a great deal easier, we just need to tap into those loves and apply them appropriately.
Would be really useful if we had a web platform that recognised those communities and talked to them in a consistent manner…oh yes, that what VITES is used for 😉
