I'm going to air my concerns about O'Neal's position first. His use of a
YouGov survey on how customers feel about personalized ads is not helpful. If you ask anyone if they like seeing ads the answer is going to be no. If you ask them about something like targeted advertising that has a "creepy" factor to it, I can only expect that negativity to increase. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of respondents also didn't think that they were influenced by marketing, which a century's worth of advertising performance tells us probably isn't true.
Needless to say, I'm not sure a direct survey is the right way to answer the question of efficacy.
I also think, and I believe O'Neal would agree with me here, that targeting is a good thing. Your audience isn't everyone, and your budget likely has some limit. Even Coca-Cola, with a global supply chain, the most powerful brand in the world, and products that appeal to anyone who drinks liquid, isn't going to spend every dollar possible on each marketing campaign. Sprite drinkers are different than Fanta drinkers are different than Dasani drinkers.
But lots of customers share certain traits. This is part of why I'm a particularly big fan of using targeting to exclude segments rather than include them. Even Facebook and Google, with their incredible amounts of data, don't always know how old someone is, or what their household income is.
That's a lot of unknowns in those charts! And it's also borderline criminal how they move "Unknown" to different sides of the graph for different metrics.
Don't let the platforms' inability to identify 100% of their users impact your ability to reach the customers. Rather than include 18-35 year olds, exclude anyone under 18 or over 35, and make sure you get a big audience. Because I also agree with O'Neal that focusing too much on small of segments is a bad thing. Your potential audience is probably larger than you think. And since it relates to this, another shoutout for the great book
How Brands Grow.
2. Shopify's State of Commerce
https://news.shopify.com/shopify-unveils-first-state-of-commerce-report-242590
Shopify did something really cool this week and published a "State of Commerce" report that takes all of the data that they were able to collect from surveys of 3,800 Shopify merchants and 2,600 customers and presents findings about the current world of online purchasing.
One of my favorite parts about this report was how they broke down buyers into four different personalities: Trend Trackers, Engaged Explorers, Savvy Searchers, and Pragmatic Planners.
Each of these personalities was quantified as a percentage of the total customer universe, and then their motivation and response to marketing were qualified.
There are additional findings in the report as well like how the Explorers and Planners have the highest brand loyalty. It would have been really cool if they gave more information about exactly how they defined and populated these buckets (are Trend Trackers defined by some set of behavior and they happen to be less loyal purchasers, or did they make the less loyal purchasers Trend Trackers) but there is value in thinking about which buying motivation your key customer fits in and how that impacts your marketing.
Another fun part of the report is where they analyze popular product categories across different countries. The "popular everywhere" products are a mixture of things you would expect; relatively low-dollar, small products. These are inexpensive to store and ship, and allow you to easily carry a wide selection as a merchant.
- Shirts/Tops
- Shoes
- Phone Cases
- Vitamins
- Books
Where it gets a little more interesting is the products that are super popular in individual countries. For instance, Germans love dance dresses (think Oktoberfest), the French are big perfume buyers, and Singaporeans (yes, that's right,
I looked it up) are are all about nail polish.
There's nothing earth-shattering in this report, but there are some fun data points and since it's the very first one I expect that there will be some good opportunities to watch how the ecosystem evolves over time.
More Good Articles to Sound Interesting
A cartoon monkey, strategy behind book titles, fixing escalators, scheduling planes, and screenwriting. We've got a good one this week.
🐒 It turns out that
Curious George was created by a Jewish husband and wife who built a bicycle out of scavenged parts to flee Nazi Germany.
🧐 If you've ever wondered why books have such long subtitles, now you know that
you can blame it on SEO.
⏳ Why does it take so long to
fix an escalator (totally worth the free account creation)
☢️ Did you know that the writer for Chernobyl a) was randomly
matched with Ted Cruz to be college roommates, b) has a
House named after him in Game of Thrones, and c) made
all of the scripts to Chernobyl freely available!
🛫 Airline scheduling is a science.
Here's your primer on flight banking, scissor hubs, and why South American flights are so expensive.
⚽ Whatever happened to
Freddy Adu?
Thanks for making it through another ProperTack email. Please forward on to anyone who would enjoy it.
See you next time.
