I was debriefing some work on Shopper Missions recently and there was a certain amount of disbelief in the room regarding some approaches to parenting I found that tied into a key Occasion customers were shopping for.
I had to remind everyone present that the customers we were talking about were not necessarily the same sort of people as their friends, relatives and colleagues. Agencies and client marketing departments are currently choc-full of white middle class graduates in their late 20s and 30s. Their peer group therefore does not necessarily represent the core target audience for many brands.
Just because you’d never give your child fizzy pop or let them stay up late on a school night doesn’t mean that there’s not a chunk of the UK population who do. When you earn your income from marketing products and services, the likelihood is that your target audience will behave differently to you – and that you won’t necessarily agree with their choices.
