NORTHERN PLANNER

I've been wrangling with an audience in a global segmentation for a while now. You know the scenario: drilling down and down to make them unique within the category, while forgetting the real role of the category withing their lives. As other people have said, it's not entirely useful to search for profound differences between people when we're basically alike.

Whenever you're presented with a precise presentation, with the usual pen potrait and 'helpful' indexes against whatever panel resource your region uses (TGI for me in the UK for example), I suggest you don't just leave it there.

What you have is all the things that make a supposedly different consumer, not what makes them a person. I sugegst you need to go further and find what really matters in their lives, because you're marketing to real people, find something to admire in them, find a link between the brand's beliefs and their own, a role in their lives rather what product advantage they're likely to buy into.

That's not all though: in most cases you'll have to focus on a primary and second audience (at least) and you'll have to find something that's compelling to both – which usually means finding cultural significance or proper insights into human nature.

Anyway, we are getting somewhere, to something human and true, to do with the kind of people we all turn to in a crisis, the reliable, boring ones we don't appreciate until we need them. 

Perversley, I wasn't going to talk about this, I was going to post about an emerging theme within this, the joy in making things with your hands, the satisfaction of a job well done and being capable at things that matter; rather than things that are necessarilly cool. Then I read this Simon Jenkins article and realised I might as well just link to that. Oh well.