Behaviors Behind Your Buyer

Audience auditing, the way we’ve talked about it, is the intentional process of pinpointing who needs your brand at this moment in time: primary, secondary, and tertiary buyers. Once you know WHO needs you, it’s time to go a step further in understanding how, and why, they buy. Bridging the moment when someone decides your business is worth it, and the action they take when they decide you’re something they can’t live without, is where we’re heading next.

Consumers change from quarter to quarter. Life is constantly reorganizing priorities, which means wallets and willingness to spend are constantly in flux too. Like a coffee and a scone go hand in hand, market flux and buying patterns do too. Only those things have much higher consequences on revenue year over year than a pastry.

Is your client a new parent? Their relationship with time, money, and what constitutes a worthwhile purchase has been completely reorganized. Are they navigating a job transition? An aging parent? A mortgage rate that came in higher than expected? None of these things show up in a defined audience category, but almost all of them show up in behavioral patterns.

Another behavioral influencer is macro systemic changes. Economic shifts alongside geopolitical ones, technological disruption, a public health crisis, all contribute to behavioral changes too. These things shape dinner table conversations but also annual budgets, and the belief around what is affordable, necessary, or urgent.

Knowing your audience is critical. The next step is understanding audience insights—what your customers actually DO when life is happening to them. When it comes to the brand platform, we define audience insights to answer: are we relevant to this audience’s day-to-day life, or are we relevant to a past version of them, and assumed they’d stick around after things have changed?

The next time you build an audience profile or a persona, reference this and push one step further. Try to understand the insights around your audience—what they do, what they need, and how your brand solves those gaps—becasue that’s what’s going to make your research, your brand strategy, and your marketing work that much smarter for you.

Coming up, the Devil’s Advocate approach on brand hierarchy. What is it? Why does it matter so much? And how do brands keep it in tact when things change? We’re getting into it. Stay tuned.

We’re always here, too.

—The Jayniacs