Rory Sutherland Columnist T Taking aim marketing approach ie identifying people and matching a message he very phrase target market is revealing. It brings to to them. On the contrary, it identified messages and then set out to mind a set of concentric circles with a bullseye in the find those people with whom the messages resonated most. middle. This bullseye is of course your core target In the case of political campaigning, it is acknowledged that some market or audience. people are impossible to convert, others will vote for you regardless. Like audience, market is used in the singular. The driving idea Nevertheless, in pursuing the magic margin of floating voters, it was being that the closer someone is to some demographic or notional accepted that dierent messages would exert dierent levels of ideal, the more attention and expense should be devoted to their potency. There are some political issues, after all, which many conversion. And that, just as a target has only one centre, a target people just dont care about at all. Equally, many people have a market has at its centre one ideal customer with other, less valuable particular hot button. Ahead of the Brexit vote, alongside money, customers radiating outwards, progressively diminishing in migration and one or two other emotive issues, the Leave campaign importance in proportion to the extent they dier from that ideal in at one time considered creating a group called Vapers for Brexit to one or more characteristics. mobilise a group of a million or so people who felt threatened by the I suspect this idea is popular in some digital circles, since a linear EUs highly restrictive approach to e-cigarettes. model of that kind is amenable to optimisation algorithms and so I would call this a behaviour-first approach. Rather than forth. Whether it bears much relation to reality is a separate question. identifying the perfect message for a theoretically ideal customer, Recently, a number of prominent campaigns have diverged very you identify those diverse pockets that might be amenable to significantly from the idea of the target market. These approaches adopting a behaviour and work backwards have been characterised by splitting not from there. lumping. They also test a far wider In consumer marketing, this approach is range of messages and creative A number of prominent applicable more often than we think. I approaches than is typically found in campaigns have diverged very hope Byron Sharp (professor of marketing online advertising. Notably, these new significantly from the idea of science at the University of South approaches have been used not in the target market Australia) wont mind me saying this, but commercial marketing but in either one of the most important messages from political campaigning, or in combating his research is essentially that your customers are a much messier vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic. group than you like to admit. The idea that brands are distinguished They have all diverged from the textbook approach for fairly from one another by demography is largely baloney. sensible reasons. In the case of promoting vaccination against There are several other reasons why I think the splitter approach Covid-19, your target audience is, of necessity, everybody. Many of may be underused. For one thing, digital and addressable media are these people will be readily compliant, but even these easier targets perfectly suited to it, in a way that mass media are not. For another, will need some encouragement or helpful reminders to overcome many large advertisers insurance comparison websites, broadband inertia. At the other extreme, some of your audience will be highly and satellite TV, mobile phone networks and so on eectively have sceptical or downright hostile from the outset. a target audience of everybody. In the case of the resisters, their reluctance will have many But there is a bigger reason, still: the value of serendipity. By dierent causes and be driven by very dierent motivations and starting with multiple hypotheses rather than a single preconception, beliefs. In such cases, dierent messages may be necessary to you are simply much more likely to get lucky. True, you sacrifice a overcome their existing antipathy for instance an appeal to the certain theoretical and procedural neatness, but the great gain is collective good may work better for some; an appeal to fear may that the second approach is much more likely to reveal something work better for others. (There was even a group identified whose valuable that you didnt know, rather than merely confirming (or anti-vax stance was predominantly driven not by any ideology, but disproving) what you think you know already. Define your audience by a fear of needles.) too narrowly and you may end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. What is noticeable about this work is that it reversed the typical 7 Impact ISSUE 39 2022_pp6-7_Rory.indd 7 23/09/2022 12:27