Individual Fingerprints

The new demographics are simple: everyone is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. We’re seeing the end of broad-brush demographic profiling. Forget simply advertising cereal to any “female-head-of-household-middle-income-25-to-45”. Most of your adspend will be wasted on people who never eat breakfast or who ignore your billboards entirely.

But suppose you are a small specialty foods manufacturer trying to market a new cereal. It may be true there’s not enough value in that untargeted mass advertising. However, it may be worth your while to join the community at the PostPunkKitchen or run a promotion on the MrBreakfast site. And if you’re thoughtful about the information you provide on your site, you can easily connect with the customer or social influencer who’s searching for breakfast cereal ingredient labels online. Offer that searcher your clean-label information, information about children’s nutrition, and maybe some coupons and recipes. Sign her up to be part of your online rewards program. Soon she’ll be happy to tell you what she buys, how often, when, where, and why. Oh yeah, and you’ll also discover she’s a vegetarian with two preteen stepchildren who really want you to use more eco-friendly packaging.

Consumers are able to communicate their own individual identities today, while revealing their interests and behaviors making it easier to identify and connect with those whose values align with yours. And markets can actually identify and connect with you when your values align with their interests. So there is an opportunity now to focus on solving problems on almost a unique personal fingerprint level. That’s why the hot new demographic is not an age group, an income level or a zip code. It’s hardly a group at all.

Say you live in the Pacific Northwest and you like to run in flip-flops when it’s raining and the temperature’s just below 65 degrees, but still above 38 degrees. I have no doubt that with just a little Digging, you could find other people who also like to run in the rain in flip-flops when it’s cool, but not too cold. You can find each other online and create your own little community. Soon, you may create a running sandal company of your own or an existing running sandal company will find you, by matching certain points of your online fingerprints.

Marketers can find niche markets for their products and they can make niche products to suit these markets. Even if you aren’t going to sell five million units of running sandals, isn’t there a way to sell a half million or even a quarter million units and have a good, profitable niche? You might even be able to develop a similar product that’s just right for groups of golf sandal lovers and fishing sandal lovers and any number of other niche markets who will be incredibly loyal to your specialized products. More and more companies are going to be asking themselves how they can take advantage of niche markets and incorporate real time feedback into their product lifecycle development

So these personal fingerprints have a lot to do with how marketers can connect products directly to smaller and smaller subcultures. There’s also an interesting corollary to the uniquely personal ID: the personal profile.