Johanna Blakley "Social Media and the End of Gender / Demographics"
How social media, and increasing female dominance of it, are defining the contents of the global village and changing the way advertising and marketing thinks about consumers. By increasingly dominating social networks, the entire media landscape may become more feminine / feminist.
People don't aggregate according to age, income & gender. They aggregate around shared interests. If you're selling something, the fact that a person is male, female, rich, middle class, white, black, young, old, single, married, divorced, etc. is of no importance, or of greatly diminished importance (depending on the product).
The main driver of sales is shared interests and perceived value related to that interest, not some marketing model of the typical consumer. Stereotypes, psychographics, and demographic categories are steadily seen to be archaic and of diminished value to marketing and sales. What, then, is the role of the media company vis a vis social networks?
Even though it's important to know various psychographic and demographic statistics about your customer base and overall market, and to use this information to help formulate marketing campaigns, the primary consideration should be shared interests and how to accommodate these interests in a universal manner, appealing to all ages, genders, incomes, etc.
This agrees with common sense when you consider how, as people of all types get online and share their interests, these interests will naturally become untethered from specific ethnic, geographical, racial, gender, age, religion, income, and other characteristics, circulating freely, irrespective of statistical categories, resulting in the interests becoming more homogenous and universal.
Thus, to think organic food, for example, is of interest primarily to upper income, highly educated, environmentalist, or female gender categories may be increasingly less true, as more people share this interest in their social networks and expose people of different categories to organic food and natural lifestyles.
TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design.
No comments:
Post a Comment