[Sigia-l] Re: audience analysis and demographics

[Ferguson, Natalie]

> 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? I have limited experience using research like that for real life
IA
> work, and have found it's value very limited, but surely other people can
> give different experiences?

I find for projects in our area that basic demographics are a first step in
about any project. We have to know who our target audiences are, and what
characteristics they share -- or don't. Otherwise, it's hard to come up with
useful content, not to mention how to build an architecture around it.
Demographics are part of profiling your audiences.

In worst case scenario, some projects sound great until you realize -- from
basic demographics, among other information sources -- that the group you're
aiming for doesn't even really make much use of the Web to obtain what
you're trying give/offer/teach them.

Janna's note re using demographics for recruiting users for testing is big
for us too -- you can really screw up your tests if you get people who
aren't among the folks who you are targeting or who are members of an
important unintended site audience.

Those of us who also have to consider content development rely on
demographics as well -- helps with length, tone, chunking, presentation, you
name it.

Finally for evaluation purposes, especially if you were comparing the
results of usage of a Web product compared to a print product for a
campaign, having those demographics helps in framing the evaluation,
modeling, and quantifying the results.

Provided you have useful demographic measures which validly describe the
nature of the audiences you're looking at, demographics are a good tool --
at least here. Getting valid, reliable demographic measures is another
story.

Hence some of the frustration I'm hearing.

Natalie Ferguson, MA, MPH 
Health Communications Specialist 
nbd2 at cdc.gov <mailto:nbd2 at cdc.gov>  


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