Edition 2 - "Whoops"
Highlights: April 14-20, 2023
Hello again! We’re back with the second edition, joining us are a few more subscribers which is very much appreciated, welcome noobs!
Firstly a bit of housekeeping, I had a few questions along the lines of “it would be better if we could link to the Twitter threads”. I’ll admit it was a dumb idea to start this newsletter amidst a handbags between Elon and the folks at Substack, but I did make all images hyperlink, but I can see how that’s easily missed, so a reminder ALL IMAGES LINK TO TWITTER. Thanks!
Paid subscribers, I welcome your suggestions of things I posted on Twitter which would be fun to explore. Eventually I hope this weekly will become fully user-requested.
Part 1: Fellow Marketers… WTF?!
Last week (in the bit only paid subscribers could access) I looked at what went wrong when a VP of Marketing at Bud Light made the classic mistake of assuming she was the customer. Fun and games and boycotts and the (temporary?) collapse of a brand ensued. Whoops. This is a common problem with marketers, to the point that “you are not the customer” is something of a mantra. But this begs the question “who is your customer?” I mean you can’t just input a bit of demography and assume it will work, as the tweet neatly points out:
So how do we figure this out. At this point we need to rewind a bit.
KYC for Marketers - The Old Ways
For more than a century the marketing industry devoted its time developing ever more sophisticated tools to segment its audience. It began simply - age, gender, location etc, but with the popularisation of human psychology marketers dived in to ever more sophisticated models of the customer psyche. So we saw things like “psychographics” and other tools used to help us segment audiences. Sometimes things went a little overboard and there was often some pretty phoney science involved (Myers Briggs profiles I see you!), but overall it worked. The effort of marketing became less about “broadcast” and more about “insight”. Campaigns based on customer insights are more compelling and usually cost effective and the tweet above gives a hint as to why - just because people have things in common demographically doesn’t mean they’ll think the same way or act the same way - or buy the same way.
The Generation Game
But a funny thing started happening about 30 years ago (or maybe a bit later). It was this: demographic observations about groups of people began to be associated with their personalities for marketing purposes. More simply, “Baby Boomers” and then “Generation X” shifted from being demographic observations to aspects of popular culture and with psychographic assumptions about them. Initially this didn’t have TOO bigger an impact in the marketing industry - I started my career in the late 90’s and proper psychographic segmentation still reigned supreme. But all that changed with the popularisation of “Millennials”.
Urgh, bloody Millennials 🙄
“Millennials” was something that started in marketing departments and became a cultural touchstone. Whereas Baby Boomers felt like an observation, and Generation X felt like a cynical way to sell stuff, Millennials seemed like a cultural movement (NOTE: this blog isn’t intended to be a full examination of that phenomenon). But it did weird things to marketers and companies.
For some reason, psychographics went out the window and people started talking about generically targeting Millennials or GenZ. This is huge change, and it’s dumb! Why? Well think about that for a moment: you’re throwing a blanket over an entire generation of people because you think they all think the same way and will all find your products appealing in the same way. WUT?! If I stood up in a presentation said “we’re going to target Capricorns and Pisceans” I’d be laughed out of the room because assuming people born in the same month share attributes is rubbish. But people saying this ALL THE TIME about people born over a 20 year period is ok? Yes, that is as stupid as it sounds.
Very Revealing Preference
But other weird things have happened in parallel. I mentioned earlier the concept of psychographic segmentation, well it hasn’t gone away entirely. While brand marketers seem to have dropped the ball, their cousins in performance marketing are carrying it forward with the help of online advertisers like Meta, not based on customer “beliefs” but “behaviours”. Audience segmentation in online ads is INCREDIBLE - almost now too good due to how it atomises audiences. For performance marketers, segmentation based on behaviour is fine. However, for brand marketers behaviour-based segmentation can pose problems if you’re introducing something new, because trying to change perception, or if you need to appeal to a much bigger audience.
Where Bud Whoopsed
So what is the outcome of all this? Well circling back to where we started with our discussion on Bud Light from last week, it means that brand marketers are likely to slip into lazy patterns of thinking about their audiences. As a results whole businesses will never look very hard at which customers are most important to them. So if you hear anyone say “we’re targeting Millennials” or “our customers are GenZ”, assume they don’t know what they’re doing and definitely ask more questions.
My Teen Dream
Ultimately generational cohorts, if they’re used at all, should be used as a shorthand for “young people who came of age at a certain point in time” (indeed that’s where the original term Baby Boomers came from). What is noticeable is there are common attributes to all 'generational cohorts at the point they’re coined: distrust of authority; politically idealistic; open to new experiences; socially liberal; available disposable income; deeply engaged with technology etc etc. In essence these are general attributes of young people as they grow into adult into adulthood in their late teens and 20s. “Teenagers” does this for people as they pass through puberty into adulthood, maybe we should invent a term for what comes after as well?
Coda
One more tweet to demonstrate the stupidity of assuming whole generations are your target audience. “GenZ” like any group of young people tend to be early adopters of new tech and ideas. This is a great opportunity for businesses, but kids… well… they’re fickle as hell. If you’re the current fad, don’t assume that’s forever. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
