Death by a thousand demographic cuts.

As a whole, marketers love determining how people are different. And ad researchers are often pushing to find how people are different. Some clients want us to tell them how their prospective customers are different. And the media outlets work diligently to explain how their audience is different than all the rest. It’s possible to get lost in finding differences and segmenting people to better communicate with them.

But beware that you don’t complexify yourself into a meaningless campaign.

It happens like this: We have 14 target audiences we need to reach. Men over 35 with a shoe size smaller than 9 tend to like our product because it makes them feel younger, teenagers with more than two siblings purchase our product because it makes them feel older, and millennials taller than 5’ 6” tend to choose us because they like the way it makes them look in the morning, and on and on. So, you put together a great media plan, create semi-custom campaigns for each of your audiences and a year later you sit back and wonder, “How come the men over 35 numbers went down? And teenagers just stopped using our product all together? Well, thankfully, sales held firm for our millennials.”

What went wrong? You have a binder that is 5” thick that proves you did your homework. Unfortunately, what you don’t have is a well-defined brand. (A quick refresher: A brand lives in people’s heads, not in your binder.) If it is not well-defined, it simply means there is no common positioning and emotional feeling about you among your audience. Why? Because you tried to give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their diversity. What you need to do is give your brand unique meaning across many diverse people, based on their sameness.

People do not make purchase decisions based on their demographics. They make decisions on a much more personal level. So, when you get into your planning, sometimes it helps to cut across your demographic segments and figure out, “how are these people the same?” “What values do they share?”

“Is there a common factor that is driving a decision to be made?”

You might be surprised at how the sameness of your segments may be the key to your campaign’s success.