EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE OF YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

How well do you know your Target Audience?

When you visit a marketing agency or company for your firm, the first question they ask is what is your target audience. A target audience is a group of people that your product is for, towards whom a marketing campaign is directed. Establishing an audience is essential for successful marketing campaigns as it narrows down the focus making the call for a product or service more specific and personal. And often more effective. One of the key things that differentiates an audience is the age difference and how different age groups react to different emotions. There are many emotions specific to certain age groups that they are better at recognizing than others. Research believes that for certain groups, certain emotions should be targeted for a greater impact. This article can serve as a guide on which emotions to target for what age group.

New-Born and Children:

Promoting a product or service for children including new-born and toddlers means that brands need to target their parents who hold most of the purchasing power. Most parents are access to child-friendly and family areas. Services and products can reach out to them by campaigning on large scale events and festivals. Other methods are to utilize larger pictures and aerial adverts which can create an association with children regardless of age. For parents of young children especially new-born, social media is quite effective as it allows parents to access new information when they are not cognitively stressed out by caring for their children.

Teenage:

Teenage years are characterized by the search for identity and resulting angst and anxiety. Aged 13 to 18, this demographic is impressionable, yet resistant. To successfully market out to them, you need to be able to understand their use of tech and social media. Since mobile phones are important in enabling social media, it is vital to understand and create suitable user experiences for them. To target teenagers, companies should avoid hardcore adverts like logos on Snap Chat and instead focus on fun, distracting filters that create a positive user experience. A key way of reaching out is to help shape and guide the teens in their search for identity, but creating associations. Using well-known, diverse and relatable teen icons and pairing it with certain products is a foolproof method. This leads to the brand/product being associated with the culture, diversity, interests and experiences of the teens chosen which can lead to popular interest and demand.

Millennial:

Millennial are a group of people born aged 18 to 34 right now and are considered to be the most sought after age group they are harder to market to as they are savvy enough to know when they are being pitched to and have a built in resistance to it. On of their main emotional features is the spirit of adventure. They long for something new and different. That being said, one of the main concerns of this age group is the constant battle between isolation and intimacy. So to achieve the main goal of marketing out to millennial is to strike a balance. Connect with millennial while giving them something new to explore.

Middle age:

Middle Age or Generation `X are a group of people of age between 40’s and mid 60’s. These people have been considered to be unlucky as they are jammed between the loud millennial and baby boomers, but are forced to be reckoned with in terms of marketing, especially digital as they have begun to adapt to and use social media. While their ability to adapt is astounding, they are characterized by aggression, pessimism and regrets. To market out to them, strategists need to keep their core emotions in mind. They value traditional marketing methods but do use the internet. An example is to make sure your website loads quickly or the Xers will get impatient and leave. Marketers should tailor their adverts towards this generation, by making them relatable and not disregarding their emotional experiences.

Old age:

Between the age of mid 60’s till the end of life, older people or baby boomers are more partial to positive emotions than negative. They are able to focus and recognize positive emotions more easily than negative emotions. Compared to younger ages, older people are worse at recognizing negative emotions like anger, fear and sadness. This positive effect promotes well-being in people in a later stage of life and is considered to be caused due to reduction of amygdala (a brain region that processes emotions). These findings show that if a service or product targets an older age, campaigns should focus on evoking positive emotions associated with the product so that the audience can easily recognize and focus on it.