[Editor’s Note:Each week we highlight a slide from a presentation of interest to readers. This week’s slide comes from Chris Albert, SVP, digital research and analytics, Ketchum, who spoke at PR News’ Digital PR and Marketing Summit last month in Miami. [If you have a great presentation to share, please contact: [email protected]]
For decades marketers have wanted to know more about their customers. With the plethora of information available on social media, the possibilities to do this seem limitless. Everyone wants to know what people think of your brand. For Chris Albert, SVP, digital research and analytics, Ketchum, one of the keys is to understand people’s attitudes beyond your brand. “Let’s be real,” he says, “if you’re a huge fan, say, of Coca-Cola, you’re not thinking about Coca-Cola every minute of every day, or even every day. So what we want to understand is what else makes people tick.”
Digital Research and Analytics,
The slide below details work Albert and his team did to learn about potential customers for a vacuum brand. Initially the client “rattled off nearly 60% of the population [as potential customers]…college kids, millennials…housewives,” which was impractical in terms of creating messages.
Albert decided instead to dig deeper, “to see what these [potential customers] were really all about.” The work included syndicated research and social media data, such as how people talk about vacuums on the internet. “You’d be shocked, but people follow vacuum brands” on social, he says.
The result, on the right side of the slide, is a cluster analysis that shows several groups of potential vacuum customers by common interests and where they reside. You can see some of the clusters are isolated, but most intersect. Through this research Albert learned there was a common mindset among the groups, even for those in the isolated clusters. The mindset, he says, is that “a tidy house equals a tidy mind.”
The research allowed Albert’s team to say, “Sure, a millennial mom is likely to be a vacuum cleaner buyer, but there are 10 different types of millennial moms. The reality is one [campaign] idea won’t hit everybody, but if you look at the way these clusters overlap and intersect—where the urban millennial mom has interests in common with the outdoor sports enthusiast—you can develop a creative concept, or at least a brand platform, that will resonate with all these different people.”
Albert’s team located seven different major personas the vacuum brand should target.
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