Below is a link to a joint report published by Nielsen and Essence that provides audience research information on the African American Consumer (A special thanks to Angela for sharing).
It's an excellent example of how audience research is used by the media industry and it also provides an excellent template for how to take lots and lots of quantitative data and present it in a way that can be understood by the client.
In many cases, that's the most difficult part of audience research. There are lots of quant-heads who are great with numbers and stats, but they lack the effective communication and design skills to provide the information in a format easily understood by clients/masses.
Read the report and think about the questions that you'd like to ask in our final questionnaire.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2Dv4MQMdbN4YTF6Q0Z3QkxmMHc/view?usp=sharing
Per usual, feel free to share any thoughts in the comments section.
Thanks.
Jack
There were some pieces of the study that did not come as a great surprise to me - the general growth of the African-American community, its buying power, the importance the community places on diversity, and diversity in advertising.
ReplyDeleteThe report discusses an increase in business ownership from 2002-2007 that was far greater than the general population, but there is no discussion on what's happened in the last seven years. Given the instability of the economy since 2007, what happened to all of these new business owners? Did they also become victims of the economic collapse?
It is also curious that the vast majority of the report focuses on statistics which are higher or stronger for African-Americans than the general public. African-Americans apparently watch more television, listen to more radio, post more to social media, care more about health and wellness, make more trips to the grocery store, and particularly specialty food stores, are more likely to shop online, and those just scratch the surface. I found myself wondering how this is possible - is there lots of multitasking going on? Is everybody else just wasting time? It would be very helpful to readers of this report to understand what African-Americans care less about or do less than the general public, in combination with what they do more of.
Hi Scott, perhaps the reason they did not include what blacks don't do is because they wanted to highlight why this segment is so important to the market or how they should be perceived as significant to advertisers?? I have also wondered, after meetings with our own research dept, why it is that we are leaders in so many areas but that advertisers do not seem to target African Americans as often as they should/could. I read somewhere that blacks spend 1.3 trillion dollars in the marketplace, but that advertisers devote only 3% of their multi-million dollar budget to them (Rob, is that true)? So, like you, I wonder why if we are leaders in so many ways, why it doesn't translate to programming and ratings and advertising? And with that, I am going home to watch tv, while I tweet and shop for dinner at Whole Foods! See you on Friday.
DeleteThat's a good point, Angela, certainly seems reasonable that highlighting how to market to a particular group does not require you to say how not to market to that group. I think in the piece it might've even said only 2% of advertising, which I agree, makes no sense. How much advertising is ethnically based at all, though. That point was not really addressed, and I'd be interested to hear from Rob, as well, about whether or not it makes sense financially for advertisers to target specific ethnicities, religious groups, etc. Clearly there is lots of advertising that focuses on one gender or age group, but at what point does it cease to make sense to specialize in targeting? In one sense, every person is targeted based on their behavior, but when it comes to mass marketing in TV or Printi, how much specialization is worth the cost?
ReplyDeleteOf course, this is just speculation Scott, but I would presume if any demo is spending $1.3 trillion and you are only spending 2% of budget...what is the incentive to increase the monies allotted? For argument sake, if you know that there is a segment spending that much why WOULDN'T you want to direct more attention? Millennials (who learned yesterday were 14-36 y/o, who knew???) get a lot of attention, can't afford to buy anything and they are all anyone cares about.
DeleteVisually, I LOVE the info-graphics and representations in this deck truly beautifully laid out.
ReplyDeleteI was intrigued by the stat around radio ingestion in the black community. 92% seemed staggering and even more so for what many regard as a dying vehicle. It would be interesting to see the split between free radio and paid radio.
Also found the stat on healthy living interesting, 92% care about living a healthy lifestyle but less than half of those thought it was necessary to participate in eating organic foods.
Thank you for sharing Angela – SO COOL!
HI Sammy,
ReplyDeleteI thought the healthy living stat was interesting too. As I mentioned above, the research dept shared a deck with us on Weds about Millennials and some similar themes came up and I asked "if they value healthy living so much more than everyone else, why does this community have such a high obesity and diabetes rate?" And he said to me, "We asked them what they think? So they may value it but they aren't necessarily doing it". I am not sure if the Essence/Nielsen researchers would answer in quite the same way. But it made me wonder about the validity and reliability of the information if saying how you VALUE something may not mean the same as what you actually do. Does that make sense?