Full-service advertising company AMP Agency has built a proprietary Consumer Identity Strategy (CIS) that can influence customer behaviour online, in-store, and through purchase. Today they released their learnings in a white paper, The Power of Behavioral Analysis and The Consumer Identity Strategy.
“Using behavioural data to create a Consumer Identity Strategy is no longer for the Amazons, Walmarts and Googles of the world,” said Greer Pearce, vice president of strategy at AMP Agency. “It’s for every retail brand that has a physical, digital and mobile presence. Those brands that don’t focus their marketing dollars on Consumer Identity Strategies immediately will find themselves playing catch up in the years to come.”
Download The Power of Behavioral Analysis and Consumer Identity Strategies white paper here.
AMP Agency’s CIS is unique in that it is not simply audience modelling. The agency’s analysis enabled it to move beyond self-reported consumer data to build better personas and journeys with behavioural data. Instead, the agency complemented that information with how consumers behaved, both online and offline.
Both sets of information help brand marketers to leverage owned behavioural data from website analytics and CRM to in-store foot traffic to see how consumers are actually interacting with their brands’ brand across owned properties both on- and off-line.
For example, AMP worked with a fashion brand known for its laid-back SoCal style to build and expand the consumer base. Traditionally, marketers must make assumptions about its brand audience by building surveys and assembling focus groups.
AMP Agency did not make assumptions about the client’s consumers and eschewed legacy research. Instead, the agency built a proprietary version of doppelgängers - personas based on actual shoppers.
AMP Agency’s media team geo-fenced each of the brand’s and their competitors’ physical locations so they could observe the behaviours of real shoppers on a large scale. They were also able to create more perfect personas, identify underserved target consumers, build new shopper profiles and weed out low-value customer types. By doing this, AMP Agency was able to make the client’s budget go further.
By layering in this behavioural data, AMP Agency discovered profound insights that changed the client’s preconceived notions about their consumer targets.
Instead of seeing shoppers from the Midwest, as expected, AMP Agency found that the client’s actual shoppers were much more likely to be from coastal states. While the expected audience was a 35+ stay-at-home mum or teacher, only 4% of shoppers were seen in school zones, and the majority were observed working in corporate office buildings.
There were also a significant number of younger shoppers browsing, but not buying - a signifier of a new audience segment for the brand.
These, along with many detailed behavioural data points and insights, shaped a new marketing strategy for the brand - one that couldn’t have been developed solely using traditional research methods.
By using a custom CIS, AMP Agency uncovered insights about existing consumers, and identified potential new customers. By also using physical location data to identify media opportunities (where to place out of home OOH media or conduct an event) the agency had input into the brand’s real-estate and investment decisions.
“This is a breakthrough approach to linking digital and physical data and helping us identify the customer touchpoints most likely to lead to sales conversion,” added Pearce.