What I learned at MPA Academy Audience Segmentation

What I learned at MPA Academy | Audience Segmentation

Team IF recently attended a number of the MPA’s Academy training courses. The sessions are practical, interactive and full of inspirational best practices, models and techniques that you can instantly use. They cover a broad range of topics from insight and segmentation to strategy and presenting and are run by the team at Planning Express.

Attending the sessions is a great way to top up on knowledge, explore new techniques and generally get excited about some of the theory’s behind creating and delivering great campaigns. Stuart Hornby, client services director at IF Agency shares his learnings from the ‘Audience Segmentation’ course.

Every Day’s A School Day

This half day course focused on getting to grips with who your audience is and clearly segmenting them. We explored a set of techniques that allow us to get a true understanding of how our various audiences may behave, what they think and how they feel.

The key take outs from the session included:

1. Audience insight can never be underestimated.

2. The best audience segmentations are often attitudinal and these can lead to real insight.

3. Learn to look for differences not just similarities

“Nothing is as powerful as an insight into human nature… what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action… if you know these things about a man, you can touch him at the core of his being.” Bill Bernbach

No to - “First time mums with children under 3 months ”

Yes to – “First-time-mothers who hoover up any information they can and are desperate to do the right thing for their baby”

“Our diversity is our strength. What a dull and pointless life it would be if everyone was the same.” Angelina Jolie

Returning back in to the office and firing on all cylinders, Team IF is exploring segmentation with a fresh spring in our step. Today’s challenge is looking deeper at Arriva’s buses customer database, mixing in a splash of TGI, a dash of Mosaic, and a heap full of quantitative and qualitative research.

The outputs will no doubt lead us to develop tighter segmentations, clearer insights and killer campaign propositions that will ultimately help us, to help our clients talk to their audience in a more relevant and compelling manner… bring it on!