December 22, 2010
with arauser
This post has 8 Comments, add yours! Tagged under: Marketing Observations
When it comes to target audiences, marketers are often concerned about age demographics. But how important is the age of a consumer really?
For example: male, 21 to 35, GCC resident. This doesn’t say very much if you’re trying to sell tennis shoes. After all you’re selling, not exporting.
Where’s the predicament in this example?
There is a relatively significant difference between the ages of 21 and 35 (almost 15 years). How relevant does that make the age of the user really? Think for example, how you would reach auntie Arzu, 45, who wants to buy a new pair of tennis shoes for her nephew’s birthday?
This is when targeting by interest comes becomes important. Studying your targets’ interests allows you to dissect your customers better. It helps you choose relevant media that create a context for your product and the consumer.
Facebook gives us some great stats to back this argument. About 16,000 people in the region claim to be interested in tennis, but only 60% are between 21 and 35. What happens to the other 40% interested in tennis? How do you target their age groups?
Let’s say, for arguments sake that I made these age groups up. Still, your target group needs to be between the ages of 5 and 60 - which makes age irrelevant altogether. Otherwise you would still be missing out on auntie Arzu’s unaccounted interest in tennis.
What do you think? Does age still matter?
I think it matters more today than it ever did, as younger generations are more "techhy" and thus have very different needs.
I will back-up Roba's opinion! Of course it matters and especially in our markets these days where product lifecycle is really shorter that they used to be so to really be accurate about a target group, age tells you a lot about their profile!
I think the idea of having ready made segmentation criteria that works for all or most markets, products, and audiences is not particularly true. The whole Idea of segmentation is actually to avoid generalization to the most we can .
For the sake of using the same example of Auntie Arzue, I think the age bands should be different and used in a matrix of other segmentation criterion, such as, you mentioned Interests, shopping style, geographical , social status , in our region probably political - think of Nike as a brand , and who knows what else.
The point here to raise is do we really have good information infrastructure to do a good segmentation, I am not sure , but others could tell.
age is not important.
At first, I was annoyed by Leila's comment! just a random statement that only wastes time the way it was put! anyhow back to the subject, to some extent I agree with Jamal Tamimi & Roba; a single criteria of segmentation might be worthless in terms of analysis and profiling, while when combined with other factors such as gender, racial background, geography and culture it makes more sense! for example the interests of a Japanese 15 year old that was raised and currently living in Jordan are surely different from the same Japanese 15 year old that was raised and still lives in Japan! having that said when it comes to certain products or industries such the i phone age is an important segmentation criteria however the span should not be more than 5 years between different segments, and what might distinguish the segments would be more of the usage of the product and image portrayed.
often the shortest route is the most efficient.
Often is a key word!
Day after day, as globalization's effects grow, and more nationalities live in our region, ALL demographics start to matter less. Other attributes like LIFESTYLE become more important.
Of course, basic demographic consideration should be present when studying target audience, but demographic studies are far from enough.