How to Integrate Profile Data Into the Creative Development Process

In developing marketing campaigns that truly resonate with audiences, intimate information is the key to success. Once you know more about the target customer than age and income, and get into compelling facts about lifestyle (and maybe more), you can—in copy and design—create a much more compelling and successful effort.

Marketers need to gather the deepest information they can, and organize it enough to share it with their creative teams. Typically this would involve a meeting where there would be a list of key facts about the customer that would include, but go beyond, simple demographics:

• Who else are they buying from?
• What do they think of the competition?
• Are they self-confident in their decision making process?
• Are they early adopters?
• What gives them joy in life?

This is all information that is available and worthwhile.

Schedule enough time for a meeting where creatives can be educated about this customer. Talk about all of these details.

Creatives can then use both the brand documents they have and all those profiles to really think carefully about what will be the most effective approach in both language and visuals.

Then, it's time to act on it. Many designers are like fine-tuned machines who see brand standards and just design to that. The work looks fine ... but they're often missing the juice that will really get the customer engaged when they look at [creative execution] as a graphic design problem to solve.

At the concept stage, there needs to be further discussion about the approach—what makes this voice and this design and concept the most compelling it can be to your market? Creatives often hate to give "reasons," but there is a cognitive side that must be reckoned with if you want more responsive and enduring creative work.

So across the channels this would mean that you would have a stronger, more conceptual approach in every touch point with the customer: e-mail, Web, mail, space advertising, etc. And the beauty of this is, if your brand work is really on-target, it will work perfectly with the psychographic profiles and other data you've gotten hold of.

If you have a hard time finding more in-depth information, then it's time to start doing some queries to your customers utilizing real research pros. You don't have to spend a fortune, but this is something you need someone from the outside doing. Homegrown surveys never get the best answers. They're cheap, but remember, this is for increased response. Solid research is an investment.

Carol Worthington-Levyis the creative director of Worthington Levy Creative. She can be reached via e-mail at carol@worthington-levy.com

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