‘Marketing should be about mindsets not demographics’ – a line I picked up early in my career and held closely ever since. I was taught early on to shun demographics entirely as they merely operate on the surface level and, given modern life, don’t reflect anything true about the people they’re supposed to. Demographics speak nothing to how their mind works and what they want. That requires getting to know them more.
As a business evolves over time, introducing new departments, offerings or off-shoots, the coherence of the brand, its meaning and what it stands for, gets diluted, pushed and pulled across many uses and needs. Every now and then this needs to be pulled back together and unified – made sense of.
But what about the audiences? As a business grows, often the number of audiences grows too, and so does the need to service and connect with all of them. When you sit in a room with a business that has five audiences with nothing in common on the surface, the segments stop helping entirely. You wonder what to do.
Having many audiences creates paralysis and confusion internally – decision making gets stuck, who are we writing this to? What matters to them? And even when the customer base is clear, there’s usually a host of other audiences that need addressing, like shareholders, membership, employees perhaps the general public. Each one has skin in the game, for a variety of different reasons.
Not all of them buy, but some of them enable and some of them block. A shareholder never becomes a customer, a regulator never converts and an employee doesn’t purchase, but they carry the whole thing. Which is why the unifying thing you’re looking for has to sit at the level of what the business is for, not what it sells.
Finding the thread
The good news is that when a business has multiple audiences, there is almost always a shared truth that unifies them, waiting to be discovered. A bridge between what’s unique and true to the business, and what’s uniquely needed and true to the audience.
It might be a need for resilience or protection. It might be experience elevation. There are often truths that overlap, and when you target that, you can speak to them all. It starts with getting super clear on their core drivers, and seeing what unifies them. That creates a base idea to focus on. Then for each audience the language is tailored to the situation – the communications adapt for those contexts while still being held by an overarching truth that stays relevant to them all.
One warning though. Unify badly and you go drifting off into the sea of blandness, which happens all too often. You end up with the overlap of everything. True of everyone, distinctive to nobody. That’s because you’re not looking for what’s common across your audiences. You’re looking for what’s deep enough to hold across them, and deep takes digging.
The fear driving that is usually the same one: talk to a single audience and you’ll push the others away. But it’s worth inverting. Nobody feels spoken to by a message aimed at everybody. The businesses that genuinely pull multiple audiences do it by being vividly specific about one truth, not by being carefully neutral about several.
First Milk
A dairy cooperative dealing with big blue chips on one side, independent family farmers on the other, and a large number of stakeholders and employees as an employer brand. All with widely different needs and priorities. How does a brand connect with all of these at once?
It was a case of looking at each audience by sector – interviewing, researching, and getting a strong base understanding of what matters to them and how First Milk directly serves it.
For the farmer membership, the primary and short-term desire is getting paid for the milk they make, everyday for a fair price. Followed closely by the long-term need of stability: riding out economic and climatic turmoil, and ultimately being able to pass their legacy on to their children.
For the buyers and customers, the primary concern is different. Is our milk supply guaranteed to arrive? Is the supply chain robust enough to keep going?
And for the First Milk staff and teams themselves — will they still have a job next year, or six months from now?
All of these things are what First Milk, through its organisation, structure and fundamentally regenerative initiative, can serve. All of these audiences want future-proofing. How does regenerative agriculture fit into all that? Well it future-proofs the soil, the farm, the supply and ultimately their livelihoods. That’s the thread that ties them together. To live and work with stability and certainty in their lives. A farmer in Cumbria, a procurement lead at a blue chip and someone in the First Milk office share nothing a segmentation model would ever put in the same box. They share a mindset.
Going regenerative, First Milk is more able to make that happen – securing the future for all of these people.
The positioning of the business, its communications, language and identity all lean into that single idea, and therefore create a meaningful connection with each of them. Adjusting language to suit their needs, but still leveraging that main hook.
Bleiker’s Smokehouse
The same mechanism, in a completely different place. For Bleiker’s it meant reframing the audience away from premium smoked salmon, which frankly everyone including supermarket own label is already saying, and toward experience elevation.
It turns out people eat smoked salmon for a myriad of reasons. Paleo diets. Smoke-a-holics. Those who use it as a showpiece when hosting; status seekers. Health fanatics and protein maxxers. And those who just love to treat themselves to a fancy breakfast at the weekend.
What are they all looking for that Bleiker’s can uniquely deliver?
In this case, they were all at different levels looking to elevate their everyday experiences, through that salty, smoky, delicate melt-in-the-mouth taste. Making breakfasts even tastier, making healthy eating even tastier, the show-piece that one step better.
With that established there’s one focus, and plenty of flex to apply language to. For Bleiker’s, this laid the groundwork for the creative hook ‘The Home of Smokecraft’ which deliberately speaks to that need. A vital piece of strategy work helped generate a 30% increase in like-for-like sales. Simply by deeply understanding what the many audiences want from the brand.
When there isn’t a thread
Sometimes there isn’t one, it’s worth being honest about that.
If a business has bought or built something that genuinely isn’t the same business, no amount of digging will produce a truth that holds across both. Forcing one just gets you back to the average. That’s the point where the judgement to create a sub-brand, or another brand entirely, comes into play.
The work is knowing which situation you’re actually in. Sometimes there is a thread and it just hasn’t been found yet, sometimes there isn’t, and the right answer is architecture.
Where it lands
Most brands we work on have this exact challenge. Every time it comes back to the unique source of truth. True-need matched with true-value, or as we call it; Soul to Society.
It’s often about finding the unique factor that only that brand is best at solving or offering, and matching it to an audience need. That’s when a brand kisses.
Applied to B2B or B2C, whether it’s a food brand with multiple eaters, families, fitness enthusiasts, or a big corporate enterprise with various reasons to buy, they’ll share a core agenda. It just takes a bit of uncovering to find it.
When a business doesn’t dig deep into this, its messaging and identity fragments. When it does, there’s one idea holding everything together, and enough room underneath it to speak to everyone properly.
Mindsets, not demographics. It’s an instruction to stop describing them at all, and go looking for what they’re all actually after.