Dear smart marketers: it’s time to start dabbling in doppelgängers.
What does this mean, exactly? It means the future of substantial and effective consumer understanding relies on the intersection of behavioral analysis and Consumer Identity Strategy (CIS).
Although consumer research has always been a crucial component of advertising, CIS is a new, more comprehensive level of consumer research. Through CIS, brands establish an authentic and evolving portrait of a consumer and their purchasing journey informed through persistent evaluation of online and offline behavior coupled with demographics and psychographics.
By developing an identity strategy that layers behavioral data onto more traditional methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis, brands are able to truly identify their consumer.
Discovering how, when and where a consumer shops, seeing what brands are stealing closet or cart space, and understanding how customers connect on social channels — brands can even see how their customers behave when they aren’t shopping.
In essence, brands don’t just build personas, but create doppelgängers of their customers through Big Data.
It’s the creation of these doppelgängers that enable brands to attain a comprehensive understanding of how their consumers act, live and behave. With this knowledge, brands can make viable predictions of how particular consumers will shop and act based on similar consumers. This doppelgänger approach can even be applied to the smallest business all the way up through the big leagues. Even in big league baseball.
With the right amount of the right data, brands can build more effective and accurate personas. They can design strategies to reach and serve their customers not only with the right messaging, but also the right timing and cadence.
Using behavioral data to create a consumer identity strategy is no longer for the Amazons, Walmarts and Googles of the world. It’s for every brand that has a physical, digital and mobile presence in their industry. Brands that don’t focus their marketing dollars on consumer identity strategies immediately will find themselves playing catch-up in the years to come.
