Every year, some 50,000 new products are introduced. But shoppers are often driven by habit, repeatedly buying the same items for most of their household needs. It's no wonder that, according to Booz & Co., some 66 percent of new products fail within two years of their introduction. So what's a marketer to do to help consumers cut through the new product clutter? Market your product to people, not target audiences. It's not about identifying a target audience. It's about developing messaging that will resonate with people. People > Targets By honing in on people's interests, behaviors and attitudes, you can create messaging that resonates with them and develop an impactful media strategy that reaches the people most likely to consider, try or buy your product. While the tried and true attributes that define a target audience (age, gender, income, geography, etc.) remain immensely important, a persona which includes granular information, around who the person is as an individual and what they value, provides an invaluable level of insight. You can employ a range of tactics to construct a persona, including primary and secondary research. Using these personas, you can buy media based on people's behaviors and digital profiles versus predetermined channel and media preferences ' resulting in media efficiencies and efficacy. THEORY IN ACTION Accurately knowing the ins-and-outs of your customer maximizes your ad effectiveness and eliminates wasteful spending. To gather this information, follow some of these best practices used by our client, Boden: Defining the Unknown - As a UK-based brand looking to enter the US market, Boden knew understanding the nuances of the US Boden shopper were critical to success. To gather relevant insights, we deployed a national online survey to understand the emotive and rational purchase triggers, conducted a myriad of focus groups to hear and see the connections to Boden and competitors and disseminated additional online research to identify barriers to entry by measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of brand health. Molding Insights into Usable Data - The multiple studies served as the foundation for creative strategy and media recommendations. Using our primary research findings, we developed personas and shopping journeys of Boden customers, answering the following strategic questions: What is their shopping journey? Is there seasonality to how they shop? Are there day-parting opportunities based on when and how often they shop? Are there improvements to our re-purchase strategy that we can deploy? Building a Successful Campaign - The research and development of personas inspired the overarching campaign 'a splash of happy'? and drove a more targeted media strategy. The uniqueness and relevancy of this approach proved successful ' increasing brand awareness by 71% among prospective customers. For more insights into how to build an effective go-to-market strategy, download our NEW RULES FOR BRINGING YOUR PRODUCT TO MARKET whitepaper.
