Macro Trend 4: Mass Niche Not Mass Groups
A target group used to be an age range with gender specification.
Males aged 18 – 24 in metropolitan areas may tend to be into football more than females aged 50 – 60.
This may well be true, but now we live in a world of personal media devices, the challenge is to make all experiences directly resonant for citizens who organise themselves in masses of niche communities rather than big demographic groups.
Niche communities can be around anything where there is common ground. This includes relationship-based (i.e family), or hobby-based (i.e car club) groupings.
Individuals can be in numerous communities of interest – but the ‘age, gender and location profile’ may differ substantially.
Added to this – the experiences we demand in a fan club of a musician could well be different from the experiences expected using a health service.
Any level of assumption when dealing in personality based communication will lead to negative experience which is damaging to all involved.
Yet still, we see elaborate justification of practices in advertising that are deemed “OK, because people don’t mind it too much”.
The trend toward individualisation and personalisation means that citizens are claiming accountability of their own experiences. This trend provides significant headaches for the advertising, marketing and telecommunications industry, as the risk of harming experience is astronomically higher when conversing in personal media than it was in broadcast media beforehand.
The media that society is connected with – or social media as it is called – is a new science involving the inter-relationships of real people who are not a number or a demographic subset.
Companies are emerging who are good at identifying who the influencers are and how the relate to others.
To say that social media intelligence is important would be underplaying the role that data will increasingly play in the understanding of social interaction.
Understanding the niches is surely the first step to being able to add more value for the individuals involved.
The promise of understanding is more than just neat phraseology.
Imagine if you could have a crystal clear view of real-time feedback, free-of-charge access to real-time research, plus the ability to monitor and affect real-time influence on product purchase.
Imagine if you could reduce your cost of sales, reduce wasted media spend and build armies of fanatics that adore your products. These armies will market the products themselves – whilst you know, at all times, how people are feeling. Ultimately, this means you can provide things that people value even more which drives ongoing loyalty.
Thus, I attest that the visualisation of a world based in mass niche is more realistic and valuable than viewing people in assumed and inferred groups for the sake of convention or convenience. This trend signals a redefinition of the abused terms such as ‘targeting’ and ‘relevance’, in addition to demanding a complete re-think as to what the understanding of individuals really means.
