I’ll let you in on a secret…
In recent audience work for various clients of ours, age has not just become immaterial, we’ve simply ignored it. It’s no longer that important or useful to us to know which generation our customers are from. Generational splits are a default way of working and marketing that’s moving past its sell by date. They’ve been a comfy pair of slippers for many years because we haven’t had better ways of considering our audiences and what actually makes them tick.
The thing is, age is actually a gradient and often a very subtle one. Outlooks and mindsets work their way up and down the generations. Are all boomers Brexit lovers? Are all Gen Xers balancing tradition with modern challenges? Are all millennials navigating economic uncertainties? Are all Gen Z kids woke snowflakes? I think not necessarily. A 35-year-old coupled up urban professional and a 35-year-old rural parent have lifestyles, values, and purchasing behaviours that are worlds apart, even if they’re both millennials. Demographics don’t work here, and in many other examples. We’re more sophisticated people now as the internet has steadily exposed us to more and more since the late ’90s.
Gen X entered the workforce when it took hold, and boomers have adapted. My dad is as happy on his socials as he is reading the Sunday papers. My Gen A kid… burying his head in The Phoenix and YouTube. Both are sharp as tacks and share memes in the family football WhatsApp group. I don’t think these are edge cases.
Up until now, the generations have been the first answer to the ‘who we are targeting’ section of the comms brief
And while it’s worked OK up to now (with a probable bias on TikTok in our channel and content execution mix for our younger audiences, and Meta for millennials and above) it’s only worked because it’s the best answer we’ve had. But there’s a better one now, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s psychographics: long held as the marketer’s dream answer to the aforementioned ills, but mostly just out of reach until recently. And this was because this data was difficult to unearth. Who among us busy agency folk had time to wade through surveys, focus groups, and observational studies, let alone run them in the first place? And did the client have the money or appetite for all of that? Not really.
There’s power in that data, though, when it’s revealed it shows us that age is far from the divider. It’s doesn’t unite, either. For that we look to the mindsets, values, and lifestyles that cross age brackets. Psychographics unlock the why behind the what, peeling back the lid on motivations, aspirations, and behaviours on a deeper level. That opens a world that’s less about marketing to us, as we move through life, and more about communicating with the mindsets across ages.
And that brings me back to the start. Because we can now reveal psychographics, fast. AI, when used by skilled data science people, gives us this power, with its ability to analyse massive datasets and reveal the why behind the what. Our work of the last year or so has revealed personas in our client’s customer data that blend across different ages. They find the patterns and correlations that reveal the underlying motivations and preferences of different consumer segments. With more confidence in our customer mindsets, we can use our new psychographic-enriched audience data in combination with performance data to predict future behaviour based on past trends, allowing brands to stay ahead of the curve.
Psychographics are no longer a luxury. It’s time to move beyond demographics.
Featured image: Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels
