Recently remembered that I started a blog a few years back at the behest of my then employers as a means to bring their workforce up to speed with digital consumer behaviour. By forcing us to create avatars, use ebay, start blogs etc in a competitive manner that penalised 'poor performance' they spectacularly missed the oportunity. Far from providing us with insight into how consumers (indeed poeple) are using the internet - be it for entertainment, communication, commerce or research - it left most of us feeling even more alientated from these people who seemed to have so much spare time to dedicate to telling the world what they are doing.
It is only recently as I have become more digitally literate that my mind has wondered back to this thorny marketing issue: what is it that defines a person's use of and interest in the internet? There are various digital profiling models out there which claim to group a person based solely on their job title, age and answer to some generic question such as 'do you like gadgets?' and which allow large sprawling corporations to easily segment their customers and feel like they are delivering a personal experience. One imagines (though they are rarely robustly tested) that they are as accurate as the postcode derived models such as Mosaic which assume that me and my neighbour are the same person even though I'm in my thirties and bought the house after extensive renovation and she is in her eighties and has lived in the house for nearly sixty years. It is likely that she would respond as poorly to a DM pack about diy as I would about Polish needlework. So why would we be so naive to assume that my use of the internet can be so easily classified?
A few months back, at the behest of an automotive client, my agency tried to crack the issue of audience types online. For weeks we debated the merits of age-based, cultural, need-state and generational groupings. We ended up using a framework based on very broad needs which seemed to cover off the large majority of online pursuits - entertainment, communication, life management, and research - though there seemed to be many examples which blurred the lines (is looking for porn a need for entertainment, an example of research or an attempt at life management?).
It is only recently as I have become more digitally literate that my mind has wondered back to this thorny marketing issue: what is it that defines a person's use of and interest in the internet? There are various digital profiling models out there which claim to group a person based solely on their job title, age and answer to some generic question such as 'do you like gadgets?' and which allow large sprawling corporations to easily segment their customers and feel like they are delivering a personal experience. One imagines (though they are rarely robustly tested) that they are as accurate as the postcode derived models such as Mosaic which assume that me and my neighbour are the same person even though I'm in my thirties and bought the house after extensive renovation and she is in her eighties and has lived in the house for nearly sixty years. It is likely that she would respond as poorly to a DM pack about diy as I would about Polish needlework. So why would we be so naive to assume that my use of the internet can be so easily classified?
Part of the problem is that consumer digital literacy is constantly changing. For every fifty year old housewife who discovers online poker, another decides that sending e-cards is naff after all and they'd prefer to send a real card (though perhaps this isn't the christmas for that). We are reclassifying ourselves on a regular basis depending on our needs at the time, what our friends or family are doing and the marketing messages that somehow penetrate the automatic filter that we all engage. Is there really a link between digital literacy and my behaviour as a consumer?
A few months back, at the behest of an automotive client, my agency tried to crack the issue of audience types online. For weeks we debated the merits of age-based, cultural, need-state and generational groupings. We ended up using a framework based on very broad needs which seemed to cover off the large majority of online pursuits - entertainment, communication, life management, and research - though there seemed to be many examples which blurred the lines (is looking for porn a need for entertainment, an example of research or an attempt at life management?).
Whilst we were all relatively happy with these definitions, they are completely hopeless when it comes to targeting consumers - not least because within each of them are huge ranges of digital complexity. Whilst it is tempting to group people together based on their digital abilities, this misses the huge advantage of the internet as a tool - ease.
Take research for example - Consumer A may be highly skilled in mining the internet for information, via message-boards, advanced search solutions etc - but that doesn't mean they won't go to GoCompare.com for their car insurance. Similarly just because I loaded my holiday photos to Flickr and linked them to my Facebook page doesn't mean I wouldn't rather book my next holiday after flicking through a brochure rather than viewing a virtual tour of a hotel.
So what am I getting at? Well I guess I'm getting bored of our incessant desire to group people based on spurious unrelated actions. The internet has certainly heightened our awareness that we humans, as Mark Earls would state, are 'social apes' but I am less convinced that it has helped our ability to define which social group someone is in and communicate with them accordingly. Whilst we are not nearly as individual as we would like to think, influenced by everyone and everything we come in contact with, these overlapping experiences surely lead, albeit only in our own heads, into a unique perspective and personality. The internet provides an amazing opportunity to explore these unique social overlaps but only if we resist our instinct to categorise everyone into segments based on unrelatated behaviour. We need a new model that accepts the premise that I am who I am because of what I do, not how I do it. How we go about identifying and measuring that is for another time.
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