Demographics as an identity is the first marketing strategy tip.
How then can you help your marketing team better target the correct customers by using your demographic data? Make sure your consumers can see it.

Demographics typically work in the background of businesses, determining what advertisements to display. Due to the ineffectiveness of these advertisements, a strategy to improve on this model is to also display the demographic data to buyers. By utilising who they are and how they view themselves, or what the psychology literature could refer to as their “identity,” this could effectively motivate customers.

Making use of it in your marketing strategies:

The identity demographics strategy seeks to shift the conversation from “You might prefer X” to “People like you prefer X.” With surprisingly few exceptions, people seek to act like typical members of any relevant social group they may belong to in order to feel like they belong. There are a few different reasons why this could occur, but usually it has to do with a desire to have a consistent identity or a desire to be regarded favourably by others (sometimes even if no one may be watching). This explains, for instance, why public service announcements that make statements like “4 out of 5 individuals do X” frequently have moderate success.

A 2008 study by Noah Goldstein, Robert Cialdini, and Vladas Griskevicus provides a good illustration of this. To encourage the reuse of bathroom towels, they set up a number of tests in hotel rooms. In order to conserve water and energy, you may have seen banners asking you to reuse your towels in hotel bathrooms. These signs’ text was altered by the creators to appeal to various degrees of guests’ identities. As a starting point, they employed the typical pro-environmental slogan that can be seen in so many restrooms (“Help save the environment!”), but they also made the following appeals:

Tip #2 for Marketing Strategy: Strengthen the Demographic Identity

You may have already seen two significant practical difficulties with applying demographics in the manner I have advised. The first is that accurate data are necessary. You don’t want your demographic appeals to confuse a consumer who is a twenty-something lady for a 35-year-old man (a mistake Google has been known to make). Even if your data is reliable, you still have the issue of choosing which demographic groups to target with your marketing efforts.

Your clients must believe that the comparison group you are presenting them is pertinent in order to have the greatest impact. On the one side, this can entail figuring out what your target audience values—for example, am I more driven to act “like a man” or “like a San Franciscan”? On the other hand, you may adopt a more behavioural economics-based strategy and inform them of the crucial group.

The basic concept is that if you can convince a customer to accept their membership in a particular group, their affinity for that group will grow (at least in the short run). A man is more inclined to act in a more manly manner if he believes that he is a man.

Another tactic, borrowed from the bicultural research, is priming, or utilising subliminal cues to persuade clients to adopt a particular attitude. Instead of showing Chinese or American flags to the bicultural participants, a website might show imagery representative of a customer’s location (such as the Statue of Liberty for New York or the Golden Gate Bridge for San Francisco), or of a previous decade if the target group is older. These symbols will cause your audience to consider their connections to the imagery, frequently without recognising it, which in turn may highlight the desired identity.

A 2011 study by Christopher Bryan, Greg Walton, Todd Rogers, and Carol Dweck contains one of my favourite illustrations of this concept. During the 2009 New Jersey gubernatorial election, they enlisted registered New Jersey voters for a “election survey” in one study. They either asked people to support declarations that focused on behaviours (such as “I will vote”) or declarations that focused on identities (such as “I am a voter”). After the election, they analysed the votes and discovered that, while the overall voter turnout was 47%, the turnout rates were 79% and 90%, respectively, for those who had approved voting behaviour and voter identification.

Ads that are specifically targeted based on demographics alone are not particularly efficient.
By making the demographic aware of your target audience, demographic advertising could be more effective.
By taking steps to boost customers’ affinity with the target demographic, this effect can be strengthened even further.