Imagine a Sydney woman aged 25 to 30. She's addicted to clothing, a high-adopter of technology, highly values health, is scarily ambitious and is eyeing a house and a baby. She's probably a familiar demographic target for many brands and agencies.
This particular description came from a study by Southern Cross Austereo looking at female demographics and explaining ‘what women want’.
Now, that’s not just the title of a bad movie starring Mel Gibson before he insulted an entire religion, but something marketers en masse seem to have no idea about.
First off, it's important to applaud brands and media owners for exploring demographics and how their motivations are changing. Anything brands and media can do to understand their audience better is a great thing for the industry and consumers. It's also nowhere more necessary than when it comes to women who are an often misunderstood and bypassed portion of the audience despite being responsible for 85% of household decisions.
A study by female-focused agency Terri & Sandy in the US claims 91% of women think advertisers misunderstand them. So, anyone who doesn't at least consider ripping up the demographic profiles of women they currently use in their activity and then rethinking, really should. I'm smack bang in the demographic above, but I certainly don't recognise her as myself. Demographics are, without a doubt, important tools. There is no way of being able to understand change and trends in the way people think, move and interpret their world without them.
For marketers, picking up the heartbeat of a particular demographic means making decisions on how to target, shape messages and what to say much easier. But they are, by their nature, generalisations, and people are nuanced.
In my late teens I had a friend who, before the death knell sounded for MySpace, would perform photoshop alterations to selfies before they went online. This was before Instagram and Snapchat did it for you. It was here I learnt the fine line between blurring out a freckle and turning up the brightness so much that a person's facial features barely register. That is the same line that exists in demographic studies.
It sounds bolder to say that 84% of my demo “invest in looking and feeling great” than to explain how it is they do that. Feeling great for some people could be eating a bowl of ice cream, a walk in the park, a new lipstick, or a plane ticket to Greece – anything. It's in that ‘anything’, that unmarked range of possibility, that marketing gold lies. It's the motivation that will make one person jump on a plane and another reward themselves with calories.
Not to discount demographic studies, but the real insight is a layer on top. As people become harder to reach, it's a more important layer than ever.
As for that 25 to 30 woman, if she exists she's awesome, but I doubt she does. She's a composite of many different life stages the women I know are in and for that reason reflects none of us whatsoever.