Demographics Are A Shortcut Disguised As An Answer.
Oh how we relied so very, very long on demographics in personas, creative briefs and strategy documents. And they worked so well for so long because they were largely useful alongside psychographics at times. We could easily plop people into a nice box. It worked because getting cultural data was hard and not really considered. In reality, they were just sorting categories for chunks of people.
The thing is, they don’t describe people. Demographics don’t tell you the difference between 38 year old Mary in Montreal and 38 year old Mary in Houston, Texas. What’s missing is the cultural insights, which is where your audience assigns meaning through how they live, where they live. Demographics satisfice because they give the appearance of legibility, are upward defensible and well, fast. Creating the appearance of rigour without the discomfort of actual understanding.
And don’t forget, your competitors are using the same demographics. So you’re just ending up doing the same things on the same corner as your competitors. And leaving revenue on the table. You have an illusion of accurate targeting, which feels good cognitively within the marketing department, but it doesn’t question what’s key to differentiation, which is whether or not the underlying model is useful. It’s classic misreading of the map for the territory.
No brand strategist could’ve predicted Velveeta becoming a cultural object on TikTok. A demographic model wouldn’t have predicted it. It was a cultural moment driven by Gen Z that was reclaiming “bad” things. If you were paying attention to signals based on cultural understanding?
Consider too that demographics just capture a moment. Culture is always flowing, shifting and incredibly more so today when our world is rapidly changing and consumers are making meaning in different ways. Demographics cannot catch this change. So what to do?
You can still use demographics, they help in ad targeting, along with geography and is making some assumptions and helping to ask deeper questions. So don’t discard them, but place them into context, understanding their value has changed.
Culture in this context is the social norms, customs, rituals, binary oppositions and symbolic capital at play within the audiences you’re targeting. This changes by city, province/state, country. It also depends on if you’re playing in a tight or loose culture.
Adding In Cultural Insights for Brand Strategy
You can keep things simpler for personas by just adding the question afterwards of "What does this person believe that their demographic doesn't tell you?"
So in your persons collection put in a section called “Cultural Operating System” that asks what rituals anchor their day/week or the moments you’re going after with your product, what do they signal to your audiences tribe and what cultural tensions are they currently navigating?
With creative briefs, beyond “target audience” add in “cultural moment(s)” which is not who they are, but what moment in their cultural life is your brand entering?
In strategy documents add in “cultural assumptions” as a section alongside market assumptions or conditions. Make them explicit for better testing or challenging. You’ll have a much richer strategy.
You might be surprised just how much you look at your audience, your target market, differently. How much richer your personas, creative briefs and strategies look. Your agency creative director will thank-you. You’ll be giving much more to work with.
