When planning marketing campaigns, market segments are often identified by labels – women or men, baby boomers or Gen Z and so on. Such shorthand can be helpful but can also badly mislead, as a recent data review found.
In that review, we saw that 3% of Australians identified themselves as followers of Islam. In the greater Sydney region, the proportion was almost double (5%) and this labelled group was of over 250,000 people.
Before this labelled group was used as a marketing segment, we analysed it further. The numbers appeared useful to the client – 30% of people so labelled were aged under 15 years, and more were aged 15 to 34 years (36%). But further analyses of the people labelled as “followers of Islam” showed that the group was not as homogenous as the label implied.
Within the group label, almost half had Lebanese ancestry (46%), 13% had Turkish ancestry, 7% had Iraqi ancestry, and 5% had Indonesian ancestry. Other Census-reported ancestries were from 22 other countries and regions.
Given the diversity of backgrounds, ethnicity and languages, the label “followers of Islam” was seen to be too generic to be a marketable segment.
Thus, while labels can help identify a segment, you need to probe to ensure that the label appropriately describes the cohesiveness of the people so described, rather than include groups too diverse for the label to describe and be an effective segment.
To be sure that a label will strengthen your business strategy, they need to be tested, and here we can help you. To know more, call Philip Derham on 0414 543 765 or email him at derhamp@derhamresearch.com.au or use our Let’s get started – Derham Insights Research form.
