Often stated together, correspondence and cluster analysis can provide powerful answers to brands and make many unknown areas visible to marketers. Using it to best potential is an art in science. Insist it to be applied to your brand year on year and then upon milestones like 5yrs, 10yrs, jubilees, and successes! Businesses will always remain under guardian angel with such disciplined exercises.
Understanding in layman’s words:
For any product / service / company / brand / business entity, there’s only one target: sales / revenue. However, when it doesn’t get fulfilled much, marketers start looking for answers to “why”. They realize a need to move beyond knocking customer doors, making sales calls or desperate attempts to chase buyers directly or dealers indirectly.
Achieving real profits honestly happen in neither traffic jams nor rule books. It happens subjective how well a good driver drives it, the one who’s tasted magical difference between mediocrity and accomplishments! It requires paving ways through consumer likings & fair exchange.
To trigger curiosity & demand, marketers see sense in influencing consumer mindset by,
- Targeting right audience
- Crafting right message for them
There isn’t any way a marketer can fail if these two areas are addressed skillfully and worked upon. For much awareness, it’s only advisable that marketers grasp undertone seriously. Grip on unique target audience can often remove doubts on higher spends if required to be made for effectiveness, productivity & loyalty.
Sustainable growth/profits come by capitalizing on consumer preferences, not by sales pipeline where most players leave little scope of gasping & differentiation.
With the goal of differentiation in market, correspondence and cluster analysis takes large piece of cake in decoding opportunities of consumer connections.
What is it?
Correspondence analysis:
It’s a market segmentation technique that graphically represents relationship between brands/products and other variables such as attitudes, preferences, lifestyles, media vehicles, socioeconomic or psychological profiles etc. on multiple dimensions. Findings are read in number of interesting ways and depths.
It can give you insights for even 15 dimensions (not only linear, planer, 3D, or 4D..but 15 D!) if you have passion and resolve to build real profits. Answers are there!
Cluster Analysis:
It’s a powerful segmentation tool allowing users to segment a given population into discrete groups of similar individuals.
It’s advisable to do a correspondence run before cluster analysis since it shows clearly the attitudes/behaviours that discriminate most strongly in that market. Usually one should consider top 20 strongest attitudes/behaviours for the cluster.
For detailing of techniques and interpretations, here’s another read elaborating correspondence and cluster analysis.
Preparing for it: Reasoning, Mental Abstractions, and Critical Thoughts
“How do I identify my core consumers? I want to know how my consumers think? What motivates them? How their preferences have changed over years? How homogenous are my consumers? How do I review my competition? How different are their consumers? How do I create brand strategies for my consumers?”
Techniques to understand consumer attitudes, behaviors, purchase psychology, and market dynamics have brilliant capabilities. It helps brands make smart and rewarding decisions on spends.
Abstract some key information usually available with clients.
What % of overall population uses the product? What’s the penetration rate?
What is the size of category in value, volume, and units sold?
Who are the key competitors and what’s their size in value, volume, and units sold?
Move from traditional TG like ‘Women 15-34 ABC’ to real definitions like ‘Achiever’ or ‘Health Enthusiast’ in line with trends
Impactful targeting isn’t about just demographics, certain age group of males/females falling in certain socio economic class. It’s not about it because, world over, millions of brands begin with it and end up being there only until their marketing monies get exhausted. There are multiple points to catch here.
- Millions of brands do end up following herd mentality; it has flow and easy reasoning.
- Herd mentality is so safe that brands do not end up understanding even,
- Demographics thoroughly. Like,
- Simple market/geography wise differences in consumer opinions. Most know their marketwise sales figures though!
- How educated are their audiences?
- What kind of occupations are they engaged in for how long and what are their earning powers?
- Stages of life events, family details etc
- Demographics thoroughly. Like,
- Marketing monies do get over if brands don’t return on investments
- Targeting just demographics is the common feasibility across different syndicated softwares
- Not many calls are taken based on non-customary judgements even though it supports data
- In the quagmires of complex work environments, new ideas are ignored due to time constraints and alignment difficulties
This happens despite having large pool of consumer knowledge available at-least for urban population. Marketers / brand custodians have greater opportunities to drive their actions more by ROI if they can use deeper consumer knowledge and sustain it.
Since media and marketing spends are meant for returns on investments, brands must define target group (TG), the target audience, very sharply.
To do this, one must consider highly reliable sources of information like single source rolling surveys on consumers. One such database is Kantar Media Group’s Target Group Index (TGI). It’s said to be world’s largest single source data surveying consumers and is available at country levels. It captures consumer demographics (education, income, occupation, age, gender, social grade, geographies, life events, family details etc), media habits, attitudes and behaviors etc. The software is also equipped with statistical capabilities.
To define TG, one must engage in thorough crosstabs to list down all topline findings. It can have answers like,
- of consumers consuming brand/s (User base)
- Demographic profile of brands (age, gender, SEC, education, occupation etc)
- Brand choices and skews (50% of universe uses x brand)
- How consumers think (1/5th of consumers believe in a need to be attractive)
- How different are consumers, attitudes and behaviors, driving preferences?
Next, Refine crosstab findings even more
The fundamental crosstab exercises set very strong understanding on broad indicators. To sharpen it all, it’s necessary to build hypothesis. Simple arguments on pen and paper can help do it.
If the brand is stagnant there’s need to add new users. Who contributes to growth? Where is the growth? How will we achieve this? Trender analysis helps answer these questions.
Look for advanced investigation to sharpen conclusiveness and market factors
Explore avg mean / volumetrics, count coding, loyalty analysis, consumer diary (a day in life with am, pm clocks), quad maps, correspondence, cluster etc.
Sometimes try to look at interesting parameters like height, weight, BMI or age last birthday in the evolving space of consumer dynamics.
With thought triggers, critical scenarios, powerful reasoning, and innovations thereof, brands can build grounds of consumer demand and tune them profitable.
It’s not a question of how well the driver is going to drive now; a way is already paved to receive consumers!
