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At its core, marketing is human psychology applied in a business ecosystem. Marketing has always endeavored to build emotional connections with consumers to be leveraged for commercial results; in order to do that, the discipline relies on research, insights and analytics that inform our understanding of consumers. Reaching a higher level of precision in go-to-market strategy requires an even deeper understanding of the market and a strong grasp of the range of consumers comprising the business’ addressable market, knowing exactly how and when to connect with them.
Today’s pace of cultural evolution is unprecedented, fueled by economic, political and social turbulence, with human behavior impacted heavily by an increasingly online culture. Consumers today are more diverse and distrusting than ever before, raising the bar for marketers and calling for more nuance and complexity in our strategies.
To date, marketers rely on two-dimensional modalities to inform these strategies, building personas based on gender, income, geography, education level, hobbies, likes and dislikes. We take big leaps based on demographic and psychographic data that shape our perception of our customer base. This is not enough anymore. Unlocking business growth with smart marketing requires much more comprehensive and three-dimensional consumer insights.
A new way to segment
While marketers have been working to build emotional connections between brands and consumers for decades, the insights used to build market strategy are often rational, not emotional. Traditional market research, like focus groups and surveys, uncover what people are doing, then codify post-hoc rationalizations of those behaviors.
As business psychologists, marketers should now be asking why. Getting to the untapped, subconscious emotional drivers that shape human belief systems is the next frontier in consumer insights. Marketers need this layer of analysis to unlock more resonant, high-performing and superior marketing strategy.
Emography is the segmentation of consumers based on subconscious emotional profiles. Using advanced behavioral and neuroscientific research, we can glimpse into the human subconscious to understand with more granularity what makes people tick. Emography adds a layer of understanding that goes beyond what demographics and psychographics alone can tell us—altogether, the three paint a comprehensive, multidimensional picture of consumers that marketers need to successfully land personalized and precise marketing strategy.
Applying emography
Emography can fuel high-performing marketing across any industry or sector. In fact, there are brands already taking an emographic approach, whether it was their intention or not.
For example, Domino’s recognized the “pizza anxiety” its consumers experience while waiting for orders and developed the now beloved pizza tracker, which shows the real-time status of a pizza order from prep to delivery and gives customers the reassurance they need while waiting for their food. Consumer behavior consisted of frequent calls to the store to ask about delivery times and status updates on their pizza, but the underlying driver was anxiety and a desire to be in control. By understanding the cause of the frequent calls, Domino’s successfully built a solution that engages its consumers, solves their problem and allows its stores to be more operationally efficient by taking fewer calls.
