Misunderstood: Which Segment Isn’t?
In my years of monitoring and analyzing marketing’s latest, one thing is for sure: pretty much every market segment is misunderstood and there has, without a doubt, been a study done on it. If you lined them up next to one another, whether men/women, Boomer/Gen Y, mom/single dad, wouldn’t all of these usual market segment suspects do/say/feel the following:
- resent generalization (the women in your market are not "all women everywhere," nor are the Gen Y-ers in your market all alike)
- feel like they are underrepresented (now that marketing to Gen Y is all the rage, the Boomers can certainly say this)
- find ad campaigns irrelevant (most campaigns are irrelevant to a LOT more people than marketers might like to admit)
Now, this is my cynical stance. I admit.
In an age where the political media thinks it has been a boring day unless a "scandal" has been uncovered and the business media only sees excitement in polarization or obvious one-hit wonder promotions or ads (which a lot of Sunday’s Super Bowl efforts will certainly be considered), it is also only the amazingly "misunderstood" consumers in any shape or size that seem to make the biggest news.
Yet, aren’t there also many, many examples of perhaps smaller, less sexy brands with ad campaigns and consumer research that hit the nail on the head? Yes.
Think about the Sunsilk haircare brand (lots of women hate their ads, and only the very very specific market that the brand wants to reach "gets" the humor). And, what of some of the recent microbrewery efforts (one of my favorites, because of its Team Wonderbike cause, is New Belgium Brewery)? They’d have completely misunderstood their customers if they’d only focused on the profile for the obvious, broader segments of Gen X-ers or men. Rather they go deeper than the usual consumer profile and get to the heart of the matter. That’s why they can reach their passionate customers so well.
What triggered my post today was an Advertising Age article about new research on Boomers (and how misunderstood they are). The game I played in my head was to replace the word "Boomer" in every finding with "women" or "single dads" and so on. Whichever one I picked seemed to work.
Now – this is not to say that such research doesn’t have value, by any means. I just wanted to point out that, big media coverage aside, marketers may need less help with the broad general statements and more help dialing in to their very unique customer bases.
Research that finds that the Gen Y or African American consumer is misunderstood, for example, may make news or be worth discussing, but it actually "misunderstands" the finer point. Each of us is responsible for knowing an awful lot about our customers.
