THE HIGHLIGHTS
Who are today’s ‘mainstream’ consumers and how can brands reach them?
The internet has facilitated an explosion of niche interests among consumers, which means brands need to understand the connections between them in order to find and reach the right audiences.
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To marketers, the interests of a ‘mainstream’ consumer would once have been synonymous with primetime TV, big national events and household-name celebrities almost everyone recognised. Fewer media channels meant a more homogenised set of cultural reference points. But the internet has changed all that.
While in pre-digital days the mainstream would have been a large group of people with predictable behaviours and attitudes, today it is more about the intersections of a hugely varied range of experiences and preferences. There has been an explosion in the variety of content on offer, and also in the number of possible profiles of consumers who are engaging with it. All forms of media – TV, music, movies, games – as well as brand content can now be programmed for, and delivered to, both mass and niche audiences.
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The challenge for marketers is therefore to understand this fragmented audience and find a way to reach each segment. This is something audience intelligence company Pulsar helps companies do, by breaking down the audience for each topic into the communities which are participating in any given conversation.
Mass marketing is not the answer to this conundrum. For the majority of consumers, with their increasingly disparate interests, messaging that is not in tune with the language, behaviours and emotions of the target audience will fail to resonate and drive business outcomes. The alternative approach is to understand the signals that indicate which audiences could potentially be interested in a brand’s offering, understand which aspects they value, and to know where to find them in a complex media ecosystem.
One place to look for pointers is in the cultural trends emerging online. According to Pulsar, tracking them requires a 360-degree view of the digital landscape – from social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Instagram to news, web, forum and search data – then applying a variety of metrics to gauge their significance and how sustained their growth might be. Understanding how fast consumers are adopting trends, and how ingrained they are in consumer attitudes and behaviours, is key to knowing which ones might enter the canon of what Pulsar calls ‘the New Mainstream’. Knowing where these trends coincide in audience interests then helps create detailed segmentations of the market.
Having defined and segmented the audiences, and clustered consumers’ conversations, marketers then need to decide how to personalise their tactical approach to target consumers. How will they weight and phase spend? Which groups and influencers will they attempt to reach? What is the content and the context of the marketing message?
The answer to all these questions is a strategy of careful curation, powered by audience and trend intelligence. Brands need to recognise the immense variety of consumers’ online lives, while helping them make interesting connections and feel part of a bigger whole. ■
Find out more about how to identify and effectively market to today’s mainstream consumer, as well as many other potentially valuable audience segments. Join us for Pulsar’s ‘Marketing to the New Mainstream’ session at the Festival of Marketing, from 10:20am BST on Monday 5 October, and available on demand throughout October.