Demographics are overrated.

Especially when it comes to building brands. Here’s a better way to play the game of marketing 👇

🧠 Psychographics.

Psychographics is understanding how people feel (or want to feel)

It is understanding what people believe in.

Sure, knowing the age, gender and location, etc helps. However, knowing demographics is just like collecting random dots.

What completes the picture (or connects the dots) is the psychographics.

Brands are built on psychographics, not demographics.

For example, when Apple says it is for people who ‘THINK DIFFERENT’, it does not matter whether you’re from a remote village or a posh urban city.

When Nike says ‘JUST DO IT’,  it does not matter whether you’re a 12-year-old or 60-year-old.

Demographics affect the ‘business’, not the ‘brand’.

Demographics are the outcome of the brand-building exercise, not the precursor to it.

Just because internet has made it easy to measure demographic data, it does not mean it is the right metric to track.

Just because something can be measured, does not mean it needs to be measured.

Especially when measuring marketing campaigns, metrics like likes, followers, CPC, CPM, etc often are optimized for the algorithm, for the platform.

These metrics make complete ‘business’ sense, but don’t make any ‘brand’ sense.

In the long term, it is the brand that stands out. A lot of future business depends on the brand.

Does that mean we should ignore all data?

Definitely not. Here’s an approach I like to follow (irrespective of the domain, it doesn’t matter if it is marketing ,design, writing or anything else):

“Design and build with instinct.

Measure and correct with data.”