In the old days it was easy, you were working, middle or upper class. This simple classification, with just three options, was all a marketer needed when targeting customers. As with many things, now it’s a lot more complicated. The office for national statistics offers 49 options just to categorise peoples employment including classes such as “semi-routine technical”, “own account workers (non-professional)”, “intermediate clerical and administrative” and one I bet we have all dreamed of achieving “lower technical process operative”!
I have made the case many times that you can’t know your customers too well, and this might lead to having millions of classes each comprising just one individual, however for many this isn’t possible and therefore there are occasions when we do need to group people. To be fair to the government and civil service they are not the only ones to talk complete rubbish when it comes to carving up the population into bite sized chunks but marketers take it to another level. Most of us will be familiar with terms such as A, B, C1, C2, D, E but have you come across, “Twilight Subsistence”, “New Town Materialism” or “Industrial Grit”, and do you know or even care what they mean? Interestingly the most commonly used classifications tend to be based around material wealth, but more recently these are being replaced by psychological and attitudinal profiles and this is very much a step in the right direction. Unfortunately Einstein’s words of wisdom “to make everything as simple as possible but no more so”, have once again been ignored and there are hundreds of different profiles which sort of defeats the point.
In this current economic climate I suggest your customers can be divided into types on a sliding scale – with “batten down the hatches” at one end and “I want it now” at the other. Other types such as “wait and see” and “unaffected but cautious” fit somewhere between these two extremes.
Similarly, on another axis, you can categorise your products and services within the range “necessities” to “luxuries”; in between you might find “not really needed”, “maybe, but not right now” and “go on, why not”.
Having plotted your products and services and your customers on the graph you should note that “batten down the hatches” is only going to buy “necessities” at the moment and will shop around to get the best deal and is very price conscious. On the other hand, “I want it now” will seek to continue their lifestyle as if nothing has happened and will still purchase goods that are “not really needed” and will persuade themselves by saying “go on, why not” and find their own way to justify spending on luxuries.
Wherever customers appear on the scale the key is to communicate with each group persuasively, causing them to feel that they are doing the right thing buying from you right now. At the luxury end, watchmaker Patek Philippe has shown how well they understand this with their brilliant campaign, “you never actually own a Patek Philippe, you merely look after it for the next generation”. Of course, selling luxuries to the “I want it now” is easy by comparison with promoting things that are “not really needed” to those who think they should “wait and see”. So the trick is to move your products and your customers up the axis by a notch or two, with the goods that were previously hard to justify becoming an acceptable even sensible purchase at this time. To illustrate this take the motor car. Some people are putting off all but absolutely essential maintenance in some cases missing interim services and letting their tyres get down to the legal minimum. Now the “batten down the hatches” are unlikely to change but might you be able to persuade those above to see the sense of a special rate for servicing or tyres and might those even further up the scale be persuaded that actually this is the right time to change their car with the exceptional trade-in deals and interest rates? In each case it’s about changing the target audience mindset from “I don’t think this is the right time” to “this is too good to miss”. To achieve this though requires a lot more attention being given to the emotional drivers as it is these which will have in turn much greater influence on the rational. Right now, across the socio-economic classes, are examples of each type – there are plenty of rich “batten down the hatches”. That’s why the wealth based classifications are less reliable, as you will discover when you ask yourself, what’s my type?
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