Chapter 6

INTENT IS THE NEW DEMOGRAPHIC

Why looking beyond demographics makes sense in digital marketing and how to do it

Ged Carroll

In Short

  • What is wrong with the traditional demographics-based planning model?
  • How to think of your target audience for best results.
  • Why you have no time to lose.

Overview

Changes in consumer behaviour that challenged traditional marketing segmentation models have been written about since the mid-1990s and campaign planning has had to adapt with it.

In this chapter by Ged Carroll, based in Hong Kong and Director Digital Strategies at Ruder Finn, an agency with clients such as 3M, Weight Watchers and Johnson & Johnson, discusses why online and more recently social media has changed the way consumer demographics should be considered.

Identities have become more fluid so how do you plan campaigns? A key part of the answer to this conundrum is thinking about campaign planning by considering the intent of a user’s online journey.

What’s Wrong with the Traditional Demographics-Based Planning Model?

It may not feel like it at times with the banking crisis and rising fuel prices but consumers in the developed world have never had it so good.

Consumers now enjoy much more economic power than previous generations. With this economic power has come much more choice. Technologist and author Kevin Kelly, whilst promoting his book What Technology Wants, talked at The Churchill Club about how a medieval king of England has his possessions counted as a way of calculating ...

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