Back when dinosaurs
roamed the earth, PR was pretty simple: you wrote something that you thought
potential customers might like to read and sent it out to as many media outlets
as possible.
What has changed in
the intervening years is our ability, driven by digital technologies, to better
understand the audiences we are selling to and, using both traditional and
social media, better interact with them.
Understanding target
audiences has always been fundamental to building successful marketing campaigns
but pre-internet, it involved making some fairly rudimentary and broad-brush
assumptions.
Put simply, if you
were selling cosmetics, you targeted women’s magazines. If you were marketing a new razor, you
targeted men’s magazines.
Audience segmentation
was limited by the media you could reach and, given the hit-and-miss nature of
PR, companies and public sector organisations relied more heavily on paid
advertising.
All that has changed
in a process of Orwellian evolution that now allows marketers to focus with
greater precision on smaller and smaller target groups, with messages specific
to our needs or aspirations.
Sophisticated Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) systems and data mining capabilities now allow
marketers to focus down onto comparatively small target groups.
In the new world
order, where every click of every mouse can be recorded, it may not be long
before audience segmentation becomes truly personal – a tailored message
specifically for you or me, based on where we live, our gender, demographic
profile and browsing habits.
It was, perhaps, big
politics rather than big business that first pushed the boundaries of audience
segmentation, both to reach and reassure core supporters and win over floating
voters.
In the UK, back in the
1990s, that was typified by the invention of “Essex man” and “Mondeo man,” both
less-than-mythical creatures who inhabited the undecided middle of British
politics. Essex man had done well out of
Mrs Thatcher, and many had switched allegiance from the Labour Party.
Mondeo man was
Labour’s demographic response at the 1997 election – an average person, driving
a standard car, with a family to support – almost a mirror-image of Essex man,
and someone to be wooed assiduously.
Interestingly, Ford have
recently admitted that Mondeo man did them no favours – the suggestion that
commonplace meant ordinary placed them at a commercial disadvantage against
other car manufacturers such as VW. (You
can read more about Ford’s gripe here).
However, it was
American big politics that took segmentation to a whole new level, in
particular the social media strategy behind the election and re-election of
President Obama in 2008 and 2012. It
used big data and digital channels to clearly focus messages – and, where
possible, target individual voters.
Dr Pamela Rutledge of
the Media Psychology Research Centre has a fascinating blog post that neatly encapsulates all that the
Obama team achieved, and how they did it.
For most of us,
without access to large research budgets, making good use of data must of
necessity be on a smaller scale. Like,
for example, a retailer with a large stock of XXXXL clothing to shift. Simple: contact everyone who has ordered that
size in the past with an irresistible offer (unless they’ve been on a diet, in
which case it won’t work!)
A thought-provoking
case study is how Accenture, with tech partners, worked with the Royal
Shakespeare Company to analyse data held by the theatre company, segment that
data, and then craft messages pertinent to each sub-group. The result, at a time of budget restraint,
was a hugely significant uptake in ticket sales.
Segmentation models do
of course vary, not least because of desired outcomes between the public and
private sectors. An interesting piece of
research was by the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE)
and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and which looks at segmentation
methodologies for public engagement.
Lastly, it’s then down
to the quality of the sales or corporate message; connecting your company and
its products or services with its buying public. In that sense, engagement is a two-step
process; first, to understand and segment audiences and, second, to then
influence their buying decisions or patterns of behaviour. It’s a new fusion between marketing and PR.
What’s both
frightening and exciting in equal measure is how evolving technologies will
crunch big data into bite-sized chunks, and then chew them into smaller
segments until our individual lives are laid bare for other people’s legitimate
or illegitimate benefit.
A research report by McKinsey, published in 2011, sets out some
of the opportunities and challenges ahead.
“The
amount of data in our world has been exploding, and analyzing large data
sets—so-called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning
new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus…”
The report says that
15 out of 17 sectors in the US have more data stored per company than the US Library of Congress, and that the value of
all that big data could translate into a $300 billion saving for US healthcare,
a €250 billion value for Europe’s public sector – and a 60% increase in
retailers’ operating margins.
Maybe we need another
Orwell to make sense of those challenges and dangers, because (and with no
disrespect) it’s going to be well nigh impossible for politicians to fully
understand where the new technologies might lead – unless, of course, they make
use of them to get elected.
We are specialists in national and international PR strategy and
delivery. You can contact us at +44 (0)
1620 844736 or Charlie@davidgraypr.com
or connect with us on LinkedIn or Facebook.
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