The human mind is a funny old thing when it comes to numbers. Pretty much everyone can visualize one, two, ten, twenty even a hundred. But when you start tossing in much larger numbers – ten thousand, twenty thousand, five million – it becomes increasingly difficult to have any appreciation of the number apart from the fact that it is large.
This problem becomes even worse when you start to apply large numbers to people. I can probably name about 100 people I know, though it might take me a while. And I feel a far greater concern when the news reports that a family of five perished than when I read about 200,000 people displaced by flooding.
There’s a numbness that creeps in at a certain threshold of magnitude when the number becomes an abstract concept and not a tangible, appreciable thing.
Because of this, it bothers me no end when a brief lands on my desk with stuff like this (and I promise this is from a real brief):
Who do you want us to talk to and influence
- Demographics- Mass market, class B, C1,C2, D
- Psychographics-Aged between 20-29 years, they live in urban and peri urban areas- Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu mostly.
- Lifestyle, they are mostly small SME’s or self employed in their small businesses, use public means of transport, listen to radio most of the time and watch/ listen to news.
- Relevant Insights- Inflation rates very high and therefore they need affordable means of communication
- Differences in decision making levels
- Potential Volume: high subscriptions if offer is well communicated.
That target audience, by my reckoning, amounts to something like 70% of the population of the country’s three largest cities. So that would be about 3.5 million people. That’s 3,500,000 people who are your target audience. Can you wrap your head around this number? I definitely can’t and I’m really good with numbers.
What ever happened to defining your target audience (a term I particularly hate as well) by picking an exemplar?
Meet John
- John lives in Kawangware (an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi) and runs a small electronics repair shop in Kilimani (an uptown residential and commercial district). He earns about 20,000 kshs a month and either takes a bus to the houses where he works, or rides his bicycle.
- John faces the same problems faced by most Kenyans these days: rising inflation and crippling cost-of-living expenses, so his disposable income has been severely affected in recent months.
- This means the best time to try and get him to make a purchase would be at the end of the month when some money’s come in and he’s not too hard up.”
Now, you tell me: which of the two descriptions could you write an ad to? The faceless 3.5 million, or John?
I know who I’d write for.
David Ogilvy famously said “the consumer isn’t a moron, she is your wife” to which I’d add the consumer isn’t a statistic, either.
It’s such a pity nobody in the ad industry seems to know or care who their “customers” are any more.
In the state of the world now.. there is something called Micro targetting and hyper targetting- Both stemming from the all the more obvious fact that the more information is out there (about the product brand etc) the more options a “consumer” feels they have the “more informed” they can decide upon choices. So this brings me to this point and why this situation should be a boon for smaller firms or more niche products. We lose the customer at hello!
Yes this person should be familiar, your brother.. your cousin who is still kinda tryna make it in the economy.. your retired dad who’s abit more causious about how the pension is being spent.. your sister that’s earning shitloads.. and supporting others with her side jobs.. But we (i’ll speak for a few countries like Kenya) have given this familiar person.. a Number.. they are now in a demographic.. a “community” of social and economic possibilities.. and thats where we lost them. ANy good retailer with google Knows 70% of the battle is not in the ad.. its on the shelves. Our wives and mothers know that..after all, they are the ones that spend hours shopping, coming back with something else that WAS NOT on the shopping list. So Mr Dexter n co at the end of the day.. should we get to know our “Numbers” more? Put out an honestly better-by-the-day product or Should we all just stand by the shelves and wave at the customer?
I am more likely to respond to an ad that makes me feel like it’s talking to me as an individual and not as part of a demographic. So yes I agree with you Dexter a consumer is more than a statistic
I recently got a brief from a major brand with a very simple requirement…. get people to comment, post pictures, videos, tweets…. share etc. The target population was the usual ABCD thing but in 20 African Markets.
Problem was the Goal… 1 Billion intereactions… and you said it correctly big numbers are a problem for the human mind, besides the obvious facts like …. the population of Africa is slightly over 1 billion etc… the biggest problem is that if we post 1 item per second 24hrs a day for 365days…. it would take you exactly 16 years to get to 1,000,000,000 interactions.
We have become very numb to large numbers.
Eh, I find fault with your math. I don’t think 1 billion posts is the same thing as 1 billion interactions! Nevertheless, it is a bit silly to set targets that are so abstract.
It would have been so much simpler to do a daily or weekly target. Something that you can wrap your head around. 1 interaction per second gives you about 90k per day, so call it a round 100k interactions a day. Makes a hell of a lot more sense, doesn’t it?