Shifting demographics means traditional segmentation is dead
02/27/10 01:08 PM Filed in: Changing
Demographics
A small--but growing and passionate-- group of people are changing the face of society. They may never grow larger than 3 million people, or roughly 1% of the U.S. population, but those people have unmet needs that they are passionate about. And 3 million passionate people are by far enough to make or break a business. "The average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling."
Developing 2 or even 3 messages for your targeted segment may not work anymore and it doesn't work on the Internet at all. Now it's about Microsegments and relevant messages for small segments. The more choices people have, the more they segregate themselves into smaller and smaller niches in society.
The combination of freedom, material comfort, and access to technology and information gives people a broad range of choices, allowing them to govern their lives and lifestyles to an unprecedented degree. As a result, identifying a few sweeping trends and expecting them to explain society is no longer possible, though that is how some futurist writers once operated. Pinning down today’s myriad emerging “microtrends” requires engaging in “microtargeting,” the only way to unravel how one microtrend might spawn another opposing trend. Given the new ways members of small groups can connect via the Internet and multiply their impact by using other technologies, such as television, any group that reaches even 1% of the population can now become markedly influential.
This proliferation of trends has other major implications. For one, creating community or unity is becoming much harder. However, growing microtrends also threaten authoritarian regimes and generate personal freedom. Society is switching from a mass-produced “Ford economy” to a “Starbucks economy,” where you make continual personal choices to shape the life you want. As individualization grows, opinion-shapers, from marketers to politicians, will find it necessary to address many different niche markets.
Most predictions are driven by the same conventional wisdom that drives the daily consensus around us...but as you dig deeper, you see a world teeming with the lesser-known, harder-to-spot developments... the small forces that will drive tomorrow’s big changes
