Pi-Consulting

Sing along:

There’s a new kind of dancing
That’s gonna be the rage.
You just leave yourself behind
Like an actor on a stage.
Adopt a different pose
From the pose you’re in.
Shine a different attitude
From underneath your skin.
Find a role you like;
Capture it and freeze.
Then turn it around
A hundred and eighty degrees.
…Attitude dancing…!

Carly Simon (of You’re So Vain fame) had another hit when she penned the very catchy Attitude Dancing 1975. This website will postulate that consumers everywhere seem to have been following the song’s instructions ever since.

Generations earlier, however, the idea behind the song would have seemed nonsensical. In the first decades following WWII, society was inherently stable and predictable. An individual was supposed to “know his place”. Indeed, people tended to inherit their profession along with the family name; if someone told you in the 1950s that he (and it always was a he) was a doctor, a lawyer or a schoolmaster, it would be a fair bet that his father had been too. In that stable and predictable world, attitudes and behaviour were conditioned to conform.

The new-fangled science of marketing thus started out in the certain knowledge that a good product with a winning commercial proposition would appeal evenly and consistently to a mass-audience. Back then we confidently defined our target groups in terms like “Housewives With Children” and “Young Males 18-34”, and consumers appeared conveniently obedient to the habits and mindsets their demographic group supposedly embodied.

Then along came the 60s and 70s, and everything started to fly to pieces. The concept of The Consumer As Individualist asserted itself in the public mind, and demographics-based group definitions began to look clumsy and misleading. Consumer groupings became more arbitrary, discretionary and transitional. Values and attitudes research began to change marketing ideas in the 1970s, when SRI in California introduced its hugely influential VALS (values and life styles) segmentation model. Suddenly demographic stereotypes were being overtaken by labels like “Achievers”, “Experiencers”, Strivers” and “Believers”. Rival segmentation systems crowded into the market with a mission to explain the “fragmentation effect”, and the days of mass-marketing suddenly seemed numbered.

Segmentation as a basis for addressing different consumer groups is still with us thirty years later, and a wonderful thing it is too. Some advertisers have bought into proprietary segmentations from SRI, Yankelovich and the rest, others have opted to custom-build segmentations which reflect the peculiarities of their own market sector. Segment names are still intoned like marketing mantras, though some do lose relevance as time goes on. (How may Yuppies do you encounter today

Advertisers are also beginning to worry that the classic segmentations, by forcing each research respondent into one “box”, risk missing important subtleties of attitude and behaviour. At worst, they say, segmentations succeed only in giving us dim and mysterious glimpses into the obvious. How useful is it to know, for instance, that people who buy fancy cellphones are in a “Mobile Networkers” segment? Then again, a housewife may be branded a “Thrifty” by the way she responds to a questionnaire; and, sure enough, there she is in the Asda store using her price-off coupons and scouring the shelves for this week’s bargains. So how do we account for the same housewife’s stop at a petrol station on the way home, where she ignores the fact that cheaper gasoline is available only half a mile away, pacifies her kids with extravagantly priced ice-creams, and buys three premium-priced magazines which she may never do more than glance at? “Thrifty”, huh?? Hmmm…

If crude demographics have lost their power to define, and segmentations are showing their limitations, what other tools are available for probing consumer mindsets? Many brand managers opt for detailed usage-and-attitude (U&A) studies, focusing on the brand’s user constituency; but the necessarily narrow focus on the brand involved often means missing the unexpected “stray bullets” which may herald a key market shift. Other advertisers rely on focus groups, which reveal much but have the drawback of not being statistically projectable to the market as a whole.

Attitudinal or perceptual maps also have their devotees. They look great, but their results are only as meaningful as the relevance of the attitude questions they are based on. Interpretation can be a very hit-and-miss affair. What do you actually learn from the discovery that your brand is wedged in perceptual space between the statements “Money is the best measure of success”, “Computers confuse me” and “I think of myself as a conservative Christian”?

All this matters because marketers now know that selling on the basis of that elusive holy grail, a “meaningful product superiority”, is a luxury they will probably never have again (unless they have another Google up their sleeves). In most product sectors, brand choice based on consumer perceptions, values and attitudes is all that is left to work with. As the London Financial Times recently put it, “The real task today is creating demand based on consumer knowledge”.

In other words, Attitude Dancing.