[Sigia-l] Re: audience analysis and demographics

[Ziya Oz]

"PeterV" wrote:

> I am trying to find the value in traditional market research (I mean
> dividing people up by income, lyfestyle (married, single, ...), age,
> location, ...) for IA's. Is there really no value at all in this research
> for us?

Depends :-)

If you're referring to hard numbers, often derived from census data (in the
U.S. anyway), there isn't much of a problem. But sooner than later people
begin to go up the abstraction layer and start injecting meaning into these
numbers. That's when it gets slippery.

Some things are fairly obvious, even if you're not wearing a white lab coat:
you don't try to peddle mortgage services to college students, their home
ownership numbers are pretty low. Others may not be so obvious: college
students may or may not buy upscale electronics gadgets. The latter may
depend on the gadget, general availability of leisure spending at that time,
other competitive products on the market, the mood of the economy, fads,
etc.

Making IA decisions based on such 'research' is predictive and is thus akin
to gambling. There was a time when VCs utterly insisted that you have
'market research' and data to 'show' how the product or service you were
proposing to get funding for was going to 'play out'. It was no use telling
these people that the 'research' and numbers that were flying around (and
used by competitors) were bogus. And here were are in 2002: we're not
watching TV on our PCs, reading eBooks on our laptops, buying pet food
online, getting medical checkups via video conferencing, etc.

How do you see using demographic research for IA work?

Best,

Ziya