Consumer profiling is when you create a data-led profile of your organization’s ideal customers. The profile will present details about certain demographics, customers’ likes, dislikes, plus their purchasing habits.
Do you know who your customers are? Like, really know them?
Do you know where they shop, what they think and how they feel? And do you know the nuances between how different customer segments fit into categories like these?
No?
Guess what—consumer profiling is what you need!
Consumer profiling is often the first step brands need to take in their research journeys to help understand their ideal customer profile (ICP).
Learning about how your customers think, act and buy is crucial, not only to create things like an actual customer profile or persona, but it’s also the natural first step before carrying out other types of research.
For example, you might want to run some new product development research. But who are you going to send your research to? To make sure you get the most valuable insights, you need to ask the right group of people the right set of questions. To find out who the right people are, you’ll probably need to run some consumer profiling research.
Here’s our lowdown of the four essential types of consumer profiling that you should know about.
Consumer vs customer profiling: what’s the difference?
Consumer and customer are used fairly interchangeably to refer to the broader topic of consumer profiling.
In some cases, customer profiling refers more specifically to profiling research into a brand’s actual current or potential customers. While consumer profiling can refer more broadly to profiling research into a wider range of consumers (who you may not currently consider to be potential customers).
Consumer profiling vs customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of grouping current and potential customers based on things like attitudes, behaviors or demographics.
You might carry out customer segmentation before you create your actual customer profile. Segmentation helps you look at the potentially massive group of consumers you’re thinking about and see more easily digestible groups to analyze.
What types of consumer profiling strategies are there?
There are a few ways to approach customer profiling. Here are some of the main types:
1. Demographic profiling
This is what a lot of people imagine when they think about consumer profiling. It’s where you’ll find some of the standard profiling categories, like age, gender, income, marital status, education level and so on.
The great thing is that there’s so much more you can overlay on top of this to deepen your understanding. After all, you don’t act or think in the same way as everyone who shares your birthday, for example. A consumer profiling template can help you understand these nuances.
2. Geographic profiling
This is another pretty straightforward type of customer profiling. Gaining an understanding of your customers’ location, right down to detailed city and town analysis, can help you target different regional groups effectively.
3. Psychographic profiling
When painting a picture of your target audience, psychographic profiling helps to understand things like their habits, hobbies, interests and life goals.
Psychographic profiling can be super helpful for finding out the types of content and communication that resonate with your audience, or how attractive your offering would be to them.
4. Behavioural profiling
Understanding your customers’ behaviour throughout their buyer journeys is crucial to giving them what they really need. You can analyse things like purchasing and engagement patterns.
It’s particularly useful for informing you about customers’ likelihood to churn, or even to spend more on your product or service.
Is a customer profile the same as a persona?
Not quite.
Customer profiles usually focus on what defines an ideal customer for your brand. They pinpoint the characteristics your business should plan to target.
Personas—you’ll often hear these referred to as buyer personas—add more personalization to the profiles. For personas brands often create fictionalized characters that represent specific aspects of the customer profile, and they can get super specific and creative. It’s even common for brands to give their buyer personas names, to really help teams visualize and understand who they’re creating for.
Here’s an example of an ICP and buyer personas for a fitness food brand…
Business problems that consumer profiling can solve
Consumer profiling is your way to know who your existing and future customers are. It helps drive your brand’s direction, guide your business through rapidly changing markets and unlock new sources of growth.
Here are some of the specific challenges your brand might face that can be solved with a consumer profiling analysis.
And it’s also good to know what can go wrong if you don’t run consumer profiling, so make sure you make smart decisions based on reliable insights.
Understand your category’s different consumer types
… (and find the right ones for you!)
No matter how broad or niche your category is, your existing and potential customers are all different people with different attitudes and preferences. That makes it super important to know your target consumers inside out to make sure you’re offering them the product or service they really need and love.
By running early consumer profiling you can learn how consumers in your target market think, behave and why they buy.
Find out what messaging resonates with your target customers
A key part of understanding the types of consumer in your category is knowing what messaging will resonate with them.
Through consumer profiling you can learn how you should communicate with consumers to bring them on board and turn them into happy, loyal customers.
Get a consistent understanding of your target customers
From consumer profiling research you can create customer profiles that stakeholders across your business can use when trying to understand who they’re targeting.
Sales and marketing teams can use these profiles to make sure they’re talking to customers in places and ways they know will resonate. While product and tech teams can use profiles—combined with good user research—to tailor products to ideal customers’ needs.
It’s really helpful for everyone across your business to have a consistent understanding of who they’re targeting, even if the details of profiles change depending on which team is using them.
For example, a customer profile used by a sales team might include things like role seniority and location, while a product team might find it more useful to use a profile that includes things like preferred device type and average daily time online.
As well as our consumer profiling question bank and example surveys, we have loads of other great questions for your consumer profiling project.
Identify new marketing channels
When you find out how your customers act, you’ll ideally also find out where they scroll, browse and shop. With this information you can open up new channels for your marketing campaigns to make sure you reach your ideal customers in their natural habitat.
You might also learn about new retail channels to explore. Perhaps you think your customers shop exclusively online, when your consumer profiling might reveal that a valuable segment of your target market would happily buy your product from a physical store. That’s an example of how consumer profiling can help you open new opportunities.
Stay ahead of your competition with consumer trends
The beauty of running consumer research on a continuous basis is that it can reveal upcoming consumer trends that might affect your brand’s performance, which you can use to guide your future activities.
In a world where markets are in constant flux, it’s vital for your business that you stay on top of the mindset of your current and potential customers, so you can set your business up to (a) survive and (b) thrive.
Set yourself up for future research projects
When we work with brands who are looking to carry out some form of consumer research, we often come across the same situation: although you may think you need, for example, some new product development research to find out what your ideal customers think about your next big thing, many brands don’t actually have a clear understanding yet of exactly who their ideal customers are.
This is where consumer profiling comes in!
Consumer profiling often ends up being brands’ initial foray into consumer research, so that they set themselves up properly to make sure they know who to target with their next piece of research.
Let’s take a quick dive into how you may need to run some consumer profiling before you delve into another type of research.
Brand tracking
With brand tracking, you often want to find out what specific consumer segments think about your brand and products. You might have a gut feeling about who your target segments are, and that can be a great place to start, but to get the most out of your brand tracking, you really need to know the specifics.
Running consumer profiling will help you find out who your ideal customers or future customers are, and you can then run your brand tracking to that audience to make sure you’re asking a relevant group of people for their opinions and attitudes.
New product development (NPD)
You’ve got an awesome new idea for a product that’s going to revolutionize the market—fantastic!
Your next step is to find out from your potential customers what they think about the product, how they’d buy it and how much they’d pay.
Great! So who’s in that target audience?
There’s one way to find out. You guessed—consumer profiling is what you need.
By running consumer profiling you’ll find out who your valuable potential customers are, and you’re then able to ask that segment what they think about your game-changing new product (and most importantly whether they’d buy it!).
Creative testing
You’ve got a stellar Design team who are eager to get working on your next groundbreaking ad campaign. Now you want to find out which creative assets will resonate best with your target audience.
Creative testing is what you need!
But, yep, you guessed it—first you’re going to need to find out who you’re going to test this creative with.
Because getting started with consumer profiling is your way to find out who your ideal customers are, you should make sure you do this first, and then you can run your creative testing to this audience that’s made up of the right people for your brand.
Example survey questions
Questions like these will help you establish the general breakdown of your consumer base into groupings of similar beliefs, behaviors, motivations and more.
Demographic questions
Through demographic profiling you establish some of the basic criteria used to segment consumers. Think about things like age, gender, income, marital status, religion and so on.
You might not need to ask these questions at all… Some survey platforms (ahem—like Attest) have loads of demographic filters built in, allowing you to segment consumers without needing to ask these kinds of qualifying questions.
Pro tip 💡
In some countries, it’s against the law to ask about certain demographic details, so make sure you check the rules that apply to the market you’re running research in. At the bottom of this page is some guidance from our lovely lawyers on how you can make sure your demographic research is all above board.
And with that, let’s get stuck into the questions!
Here are some typical demographic survey questions
How would you describe your ethnicity? White
Black
Asian
Amerindian/Alaska native
Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
Mixed ethnicity, namely ______
Other:_____
What gender do you identify as?Cisgender woman
Cisgender man
Transgender man
Transgender woman
Genderqueer
Non-binary
Prefer to self describe: ______
Prefer not to say
What’s your main source of income?Freelance work
Own business
Employment
Pension
Dividend income
Rental income
Other:_____
How much do you earn on average, on a monthly basis, before taxes?$0-9,999
$10,000-19,999
$20,000-39,000
$40,000-59,999
$60,000-79,000
$80,000+
What’s your highest degree or education completed?Early childhood education
Primary education
Lower secondary education
Upper secondary education
Post-secondary non-tertiary education
Short-cycle tertiary education
Bachelor’s or equivalent level
Master’s or equivalent level
Etc.
What’s your marital status?Single
Married
Widowed
Divorced
Separate
Registered partnership
What is your current employment status?Worker
Employee
Self-employed
Business owner
Retired
Job-searching
Not working, not searching
What religion/faith/belief, if any, do you have?Bahá’í
Buddhism
Christianity
Confucianism
Druze
Gnosticism
Hinduism
Islam
Jainism
Judaism
Rastafarianism
Shinto
Sikhism
Zoroastrianism
Traditional African Religions
African Diaspora Religions
Indigenous American Religions
Other
No religion
Prefer not to say
Psychographic questions
Psychographic profiling is an emotive form of profiling, allowing you to offer a really meaningful and memorable customer experience. It can be especially helpful when working on your sales and marketing strategy, and to find out the types of content that resonate with your audience.
To establish what consumers like and dislike
- Which of these statements applies to you?
- I actively seek out new experiences
- I prefer to stick with what I know I enjoy
- Which activity do you do most often when you have free time?
- Tennis
- Rowing
- Boomeranging
- Cosplaying
- Etc.
- Which do you prefer?
- A big night out
- A quiet night in
- Etc.
- Which of the following countries would you most like to visit for a holiday?
- Japan
- Barbados
- Brazil
- Kenya
- Estonia
- New Zealand
To understand what they value and prioritize
- How do you feel about the recent news story regarding [current affairs story]?
- [open-text]
- Very happy
- Happy
- Neither happy or unhappy
- Unhappy
- Very unhappy
- Thinking about the impact climate change will have on future generations, which of these statements applies to you?
- I’m very worried about the impact climate change will have on future generations
- I’m quite worried about the impact climate change will have on future generations
- I’m not worried about the impact climate change will have on future generations
- Which of the following big-ticket items, if any, was the last you bought?
- Car
- House/flat
- Boat
- Motorbike/scooter
- Art
- Home entertainment tech
- Do you prefer spending time with your family or with your friends?
- Family
- Friends
- Thinking about your current work-life balance, which statement applies to you?
- I’m very happy with my work-life balance
- I’m quite happy with me work-life balance
- I’m quite unhappy with my work-life balance
- I’m very unhappy with my work-life balance
- Which of the following would you describe yourself as?
- Optimist
- Pessimist
- [Other]
- Which of the following issues, if any, do you most want brands to take a stand on? Choose your top three or add your own…
- Poverty
- Racism
- Climate change
- Women’s rights
- LGBTQ+ rights
To understand what motivates them
- Which of the following statements applies to you?
- I have boycotted a brand because they’ve acted unethically
- I’ve never boycotted a brand because they’ve acted unethically
- If so, which brand did you boycott?
- Thinking about how much attention you pay to the price of products you buy, which of these statements applies to you?
- I pay more attention than I used to
- I pay the same amount of attention as I used to
- I pay less attention than I used to
- Where do you tend to go for advice on which products to buy?
- Social media
- Ask friends or family
- Online review sites
- How often, if at all, do you give money to charity?
- Once a week or more
- Once or twice a month
- Every 2-5 months
- Every 6-12 months
- Less than once a year
- Never
Behavioral questions
Behavioral profiling lets you analyze things like a customers’ purchasing journey, engagement and usage patterns, and loyalty to your brand or product. Understanding your customers’ behavior throughout their buying and usage journeys is crucial to giving them the products and services they really need.
To understand how people get around
- How do you travel to work?
- Bus
- Train/Subway/Metro/Underground
- Car
- Bicycle
- Walk
- Other
- Which, if any, of the following physical activities do you take part in?
- Swimming
- Running
- Cycling
- Rollerblading/roller skating
- Etc.
To know what they’re paying attention to
See some of these questions in action as part of our quarterly Media Consumption Trackers for the US and UK.
Check out the data from our US tracker and our UK tracker.
- In a typical week, how many hours do you spend watching live/streamed TV?
- Less than 1 hour
- 1-5 hours
- 6-10 hours
- 10-15 hours
- More than 15 hours
- Which commercial radio stations do you listen to?
- Capital FM
- Magic FM
- Absolute
- Heart
- Etc.
- Which news websites do you visit to keep up to date with current events?
- Yahoo!
- NBC
- CBS
- CNN
- Etc.
- Which of the following social media platforms do you use daily?
- TikTok
- Etc.
- What mobile phone do you currently own?
- iPhone
- Samsung Galaxy
- Google Pixel
- Huawei
- [Other]
- Which of the following newspapers do you regularly read?
- New York Times
- Washington Post
- Wall Street Journal
- USA Today
- Los Angeles Times
- New York Post
- Etc.
To understand how people feel
Understanding how people feel about the economy and how it affects their spending is super valuable insight for consumer brands.
- How are you currently feeling about [X]?
- Very positive
- Somewhat positive
- Neither positive or negative
- Somewhat negative
- Very negative
- Which of the following statements best describes your financial security?
- I am completely financially secure
- I am quite financially secure
- I am not very financially secure
- I am not financially secure at all
- If you’re feeling stressed, how do you calm yourself down?
- Exercise
- Yoga
- Watching TV/films
- Socializing
- Social media
- Etc.
- Which of the following best describes how you’re spending money at the moment?
- Very freely
- Fairly freely
- Neither freely or cautiously
- Fairly cautiously
- Very cautiously
Industry-specific questions
Every industry has its own, unique profile so it’s crucial to build up a profile of how your target customer connects with the industry your brand operates in. By asking these questions, you’ll understand what sets your brand apart from competitors and what consumers think of your product.
To uncover what polarizes your industry
- To what extent are you familiar with [product category/service]?
- I’m very familiar with [product category/service]
- I’m quite familiar with [product category/service]
- I’m not very familiar with [product category/service]
- I’m not at all familiar with [product category/service]
- How often, if at all, do you use [product category/service]?
- Every day
- A few times a week
- A few times a month
- A few times a year
- Never
- How long have you been using [product category/service] for?
- Less than 1 year
- 1-3 years
- 4-6 years
- 6 years or more
- How would you feel if you could no longer buy [product category/service]?
- Very disappointed
- Somewhat disappointed
- Indifferent
- Not very disappointed
- Not at all disappointed
- How has your opinion on [product category/service] changed within the last 12 months?
- I like it a lot more
- I like it slightly more
- I like it the same amount
- I like it slightly less
- I like it a lot less
To understand their shopping habits
- Which of these [products/services] have you purchased in the past 3 months?
- Ice cream
- Soda
- Popcorn
- Chocolate
- Etc.
- How often do you buy [product/service category]?
- Every day
- A few times a week
- A few times a month
- A few times a year
- Never
- Approximately, how much would you say you spend on [product category] per month?
- $0.00-4.99
- $5.00-9.99
- $10.00-14.99
- $15.00 or more
- What, if anything, is stopping you from buying more of [product/service category]?
- Price
- Availability
- I don’t feel I need more of this product
- Other
- Please rank the following factors on how important or unimportant they are when deciding which [product/service category] to buy, where 1 is the most important and 5 is the least important:
- Price
- Customer support
- Pre-purchase information
- How the product looks
- Brand
- How do you prefer to shop for [product/service category]?
- In store
- Online
- Subscription
To gauge their opinion on competitors
- Which of these brands are you aware of?
- Brand 1
- Brand 2
- Brand 3
- Brand 4
- Brand 5
- Which of these brands have you purchased in the last 3 months?
- Brand 1
- Brand 2
- Brand 3
- Brand 4
- Brand 5
- Where do you look for advice when you’re shopping for [product/service category]?
- Brand’s/retailer’s website
- Social media
- When thinking about which brand(s) you buy with for [product/service category], which statement applies to you?
- I tend to buy from one brand
- I buy from different brands
- What is one thing that [Brand 1] could do better?
- [open text]
- What do you love about your favorite brand of [product/service category]?
- [open text]
- How did you find out about the last [product/service category] you bought?
The legal bit
There are some legal details you should bear in mind when asking questions like these. Learn more…
Considerations for sensitive/special category data
It’s important to consider that, in many jurisdictions, some categories of data are considered to be particularly sensitive, special category data for the purposes of data protection legislation, so extra caution should be taken when collecting or processing the data.
Amongst other things, this includes asking questions related to a respondent’s racial or ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, sexual orientation, etc. When asking demographic questions, you should:
- Always get comfortable that you’re acting in compliance with the legislation applicable in the relevant jurisdiction; and
- Exercise extra caution if you are collecting any sensitive/special category data.
You should seek your own advice if you’re unsure. Some things we’d recommend are:
- Linking to your company’s privacy policy, including a message to confirm that the survey will include optional questions relating to X, Y and give an explanation as to what that data will be used for;
- Making sure the questions are optional and can be skipped; and
- Obtaining the respondent’s consent to process the data, by including wording like “If you don’t consent to your data being processed, please skip question(s) X and Y. In responding to the question(s), you are confirming that you consent to the processing of data relating to your X, Y, Z [Link to your privacy policy]”.
What can happen if you don’t run consumer profiling?
If you don’t listen carefully to consumers, it’s easy to get things wrong. Even huge brands have experienced epic fails because they didn’t understand the needs of their target customers.
And if you’re looking for evidence of just how essential consumer profiling is to brands like yours, here are some real examples of blunders by brands that skipped the research stage, leading to some creative mistakes.
Your advertising offends people
A powerful message can make a commercial stand out, but exercising sensitivity when tackling emotive issues to sell products is vital.
Some slogans or concepts might sound great in a boardroom, but could leave customers cold, or worse—angry.
Checking which messages resonate most with your target customers—and which don’t—is a relatively simple research process, but you’d be surprised by some of the brands that have failed to take this step.
Example of offensive advertising: Pepsi
Pepsi suffered an epic fail when it released a tone-deaf ad showing reality TV star Kendall Jenner defusing a standoff between peace protesters and police by approaching one officer with a can of cola.
Consumers were angered by the similarity to the iconic photograph of Leshia Evans, a young black woman who faced off with heavily armoured riot police during a Black Lives Matter protest.
Asking your target audience what kinds of messages they want to see in advertising—and which ones are a turn-off—allows you to avoid high-budget epic fails like Pepsi’s.
You launch something no one wants to buy
Let’s say you’re already a household brand and you’ve got a great idea for a new product. People are going to love it, right? Not necessarily. Just because you have loyal customers for one product doesn’t automatically mean they’ll embrace another.
History is littered with examples of new products from established brands that failed to catch on. Who remembers the Apple Newton or Microsoft Zune? In most cases, these brands put significant investment into the development of these products without even taking the simple step of establishing whether there was any demand for them through NPD market research.
Example of a failed product launch: Facebook
One great example of a company failing to undertake adequate consumer profiling ahead of launching a new product is Facebook. Their early attempts to create a smartphone were thwarted by their failure to understand that what people want from a smartphone is for it to be a multi-functional device.
By creating a phone that was effectively only useful for accessing Facebook, the tech giant embarrassed itself in a very public way. If they had thought to go through the consumer profiling process first, this humiliation could have been avoided.
You focus on the wrong sales channels
Consumer profiling is an essential process for brands that want to maximise their sales. If you don’t know where your target customer is, then you’re going to find it pretty hard to reach them effectively.
By asking your customers about their shopping habits, you’ll get a clear picture of which sales channels you need to focus on in order to best serve them. While it might be tempting to try to sell directly through your own website, if consumers would rather buy your product in a physical store then you’re wasting your time and money.
Example of sales channel failure: Pets.com
A good example of a brand barking up the wrong tree comes from Pets.com. The pet product retailer tried selling bulky pet supplies like dog food and cat litter online, but consumers could more easily buy these products at local shops without having to pay for postage or wait for delivery. As a result, Pets.com ultimately went the way of the dodo.
Times have certainly changed since Pets.com’s demise and all sorts of products are successfully sold online, but it goes to underline the importance of understanding the marketplace at the time you’re entering, and staying on the pulse of market trends. This understanding can be gained from consumer profiling.
Your ‘special’ offers fall flat
Special offers are a great way for brands to show their customers a little bit of love. But these grand gestures have to be well-targeted; if your spouse has hayfever, then you won’t get much thanks for buying them a bunch of flowers.
Consumer profiling can help brands find out exactly what their customers want from a special offer, whether it’s a free gift, a discount or something else entirely. Once you have this data, you can go about creating special offers that they will really appreciate—and hopefully drive extra sales too.
Example of a special offer failure: Morrisons
But if you don’t go through this essential process, then you could end up with egg on your face. UK supermarket chain Morrisons demonstrated embarrassing ignorance about the Muslim holy month of Ramadan when it put wine on offer at £9, under a ‘Stock up for Ramadan’ sign.
When planning special offers and promotions for your customers—especially for specific demographics—spend time getting to know them through customer profiling.
Your packaging misses the mark
Packaging is the first thing a prospective customer sees when they first encounter your product. It’s important, then, to understand what your customers want from packaging before it hits the market to ensure it meets expectations and isn’t a complete turn-off.
Some key questions you should be asking your customers are:
- How does the packaging make you feel?
- What do you want to know about this product?
- Why do you choose this product ahead of competitors?
Example of a packaging fail: Dove
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but the first question in particular could have helped beauty brand Dove avoid a costly fail.
Dove created six differently shaped bottles of shower gel, designed to reflect a range of female body types. However well-intentioned the message around body positivity was, a social media storm followed, and Dove scrapped these limited-edition products before they hit the shelves.
If Dove had chosen to go through a simple consumer profiling process, they would have understood that their target customers found buying these bottles embarrassing, not empowering.
All of these brands eventually realized the errors of their ways and changed direction. It’s highly likely they made these sensible decisions because they saw brand perception taking a tumble through their brand tracking studies.
How to get started with consumer profiling for your brand
So you’ve decided it’s time to run some consumer profiling for your brand? Good call!
But before you start writing your survey, there are some steps you should take to make sure you’re setting up your profiling to be as beneficial as possible. And if you needed any more convincing that you should run this research, here’s what can happen if you don’t run consumer profiling.
We’ve compiled the top tips from our in-house research experts to bring you the key things to think about before running your consumer profiling.
1. Start with a hypothesis
To give your consumer profiling some initial direction you should start the process by making predictions on what your research will reveal. What are you hoping to learn about your audience? This is what your hypothesis should summarize.
Your hypothesis could be something like:
- ‘The customer segment that’s most interested in buying our product is females aged 35-45 in the Midwest of America.’
- ‘Single British males will not take out our product subscription.’
- ‘Our target users are children aged 10-15, but it’s their parents, aged 35-50, who we need to target’.
The great thing about hypotheses is that it really doesn’t matter if they turn out to be wrong. The point is that, once you’ve gathered your insights, you’ll know more about your target consumers than you did before. That might mean that you need to go back to the drawing board for parts of your strategy, or you might find out that who you thought were your most valuable customers are actually not the market you should be targeting.
Whether or not your hypotheses are proved disproved, you’ll know more than you did before, and you can take this new knowledge to the next stage of your marketing, product or creative strategy.
2. Work out how you plan to use your insights once you have them
How you craft your consumer profiling research will depend on how you’ll use the insights once your research has finished.
At the beginning of the process, define which of your colleagues will use the data and what business objective(s) it’ll help to achieve.
For example, if the business objective is to learn about a potential new customer segment, it might be your commercial and marketing teams that need to be involved—find out what information they want to learn about the customer group that will inform their sales and marketing activities.
It also helps to know how and when you might need to share your insights with other people in your organization.
Your Insights team might gather and own the overall data, but your CEO and board of directors might want a high-level breakdown of what the research has revealed, so that they can figure out how it’ll shape the business’s long-term vision.
It’s useful to bear this in mind when you’re crafting your research, so that you can build additional questions and sections into your research if needed.
3. Come armed with some industry knowledge
This one should come naturally, but it’ll really help your consumer profiling research if you apply your deep industry understanding to your survey creation.
Since you and your colleagues are already industry insiders, this’ll involve applying that lens when you’re writing, reviewing and amending your research. It always helps to talk to as many departments as possible to make sure you have a complete understanding of your brand’s approach, but that will be particularly beneficial when you’re crafting your research.
And remember that everyone in your business has a uniquely valuable perspective on your current and potential customers, which is super valuable when building your research and delving into the results.
Your Marketing colleagues are on top of the latest knowledge on media consumption; your Product colleagues have a deep understanding of what your brand offers and how people use it; and your C-suite will have a valuable view on the direction your market and market-product-fit is heading in. Use the experience and understanding your colleagues can bring.
4. Set up your research!
While no two consumer profiling projects are ever the same, you’ll be glad to hear that there are some tried and tested practices that our Customer Research Team use to guide brands through their research.
Here are some of our top consumer profiling best practices.
Use 500-1,000 as a standard sample size
Between 500-1,000 people in your consumer profiling sample size is ideal.
This volume of respondents will give you a really reliable set of data which you can use to guide you where you go next with your research, and to inform decisions across your business.
Any more than this and we find that results don’t tend to change by a significant degree—and the more respondents you approach, the longer it takes and costlier it gets. But it’s also not such a huge volume that it will make sure you get your results quickly enough to make those important decisions when it really matters.
You should also bear in mind that you might need to dig deeper into specific groups within your main sample. So 500+ respondents gives you breathing room to get even more detailed when you dig into how specific respondent segments answered.
Filter down to people who use your category
It makes sense to start your consumer profiling with a larger, broader sample of consumers. What this entails will depend on things like the type of product or service you offer.
For example, if what you offer appeals to most people—let’s say your brand is an energy provider—then a nationally representative sample makes sense—everyone uses energy.
If your offering isn’t as broad as that, it’ll make sense to run your consumer profiling to a more specific, but still quite broad, group. For example, you might know that your potential customers are pet owners, so it makes sense for your sample to be made up of those people.
When you need to get specific and find out more about the kinds of people who buy or might buy your product, you’re going to need to take a more targeted approach with your research. It makes sense to establish your segmentation so that you can know which customer groups to target with which rounds of research.
Run consumer profiling when you see trends emerging
This is something that we talk about a lot when we’re working with brands on their consumer profiling—how often should you run your research?
A lot of this is dependent on your industry. For example, developments in the car industry happen pretty slowly so that you can probably run consumer profiling every 5-7 years (unless there’s a big consumer-shifting event, like a global pandemic…).
Meanwhile, fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) is, by definition, fast moving. So if this is your sector you should be thinking about running your consumer profiling every 0-5 years.
It also makes sense to check in with consumers on a regular basis with smaller pieces of research to get up-to-the-minute pulse checks on the market. This way you’ll be able to spot trends even before they emerge elsewhere.
Your survey length sweet spot is 15-20 questions
Another conversation we have with brands all the time is about the length of consumer profiling surveys.
Depending on how in-depth you want your research to be, you can often get away with 10 or fewer questions for more basic consumer profiling research.
But for profiling that really starts to get to the heart of what your consumer segments think and do, we recommend 15-20 questions. Here’s some inspiration for questions to use in your market and audience profiling research.
With a survey this long you have the space to get really specific with your research, giving you and your colleagues the most useful insights possible. But this length doesn’t ask too much from your respondents, so they don’t become less engaged and stop paying full attention to your survey.
A small tester sample is a good idea
If you’re thinking about a sizable piece of consumer profiling research, run a smaller test version of the research first—if you do this it can make sense to run it to the equivalent of around 5-10% of your eventual full sample size. You could even run the sample internally.
This is so that you’ll find out before you launch that big research project whether there are any aspects of your survey you might want to revisit. The test version might reveal some logic in the survey flow that invalidates responses, or it might even give you inspiration for other questions or future versions of the research.
Who should I send my consumer profiling survey(s) to?
At some point you might think that consumer profiling seems like a bit of a paradox—you’re doing consumer profiling to figure out who your business should be targeting, but how do you know who to target your consumer profiling research at?
A good way to look at consumer profiling is to think about concentric circles.
You start with a really big circle—this is a piece of research that probably includes a large number of respondents. This group might be nationally representative—a.k.a ‘nat rep’—meaning that the sample is made up of people from as many walks of life as possible, to represent the views of the nation as a whole.
The research itself might not be very long—perhaps a handful of questions—but its purpose is to narrow down this big audience into segments you can more easily define as, for example, current customers, potential customers and people who’ll never be customers.
Once you’ve gathered that initial data from your big circle, you’ll start to get a clearer image of which groups of consumers are relevant for your particular business’s research needs.
And if you’re trying to find a super niche audience you can just keep adding neatly defined circles to your beautiful concentric circles, so that you can narrow down your respondent base to the consumers you’re really interested in.
Pro tip 💡
It’s best to keep your consumer profiling sample size in the hundreds of people, ideally above 500 people. With this volume of trustworthy data you should get a reliable insight into your consumers’ attitudes and opinions, while also making sure your research doesn’t take too long and become unnecessarily time consuming.
How to implement your consumer profiling insights
Running your consumer profiling research probably won’t be the end of your insight-gathering process.
Far from it.
Consumer profiling is often the first step brands take in their research process. For example…
Trying to figure out who might buy that amazing new product you’ve been cooking up? Now you’ve run your consumer profiling you can define the audience segments you’ll run your new product development (NPD) research with.
Planning a game changing OOH campaign and need to know what your target audience thinks about your creative assets? Consumer profiling will help you segment the right audience for your creative concept testing.
Now that you’ve gathered your consumer profiling insights, it’s time to use them. Here are the key steps for you to take after running your consumer profiling research.
Your key steps after running consumer profiling research
Test and validate (or invalidate) your hypotheses
Ideally before you began your consumer profiling research, you came up with some hypotheses around what your insights might uncover. Now that you’ve run your consumer profiling, it’s time to check back in with those hypotheses!
Pro tip 💡
Remember it doesn’t matter whether or not your hypotheses have been proved right or wrong. What’s important is that you now have more clarity than you did before, and that you’ve set yourself up for whatever your next research step is.
Align your company around the main consumer profiles and personas you’ve identified
Through analyzing your consumer profiling research results, you now have the data to be able to create specific profiles that demonstrate how your product or service is the ideal fit for your target customers.
Your customer profiles should detail the attitudes and behaviors that mark a segment out as the right people your brand should appeal to.
At this point it’s time to put your creative hat on! Bring your profiles to life: give them a name, a location, some hobbies… By creating a portrait of each customer segment, different teams across your organization will know who they should be marketing to, selling to and developing products for.
This not only maximizes the effectiveness of your research but gives them the tools they need to be clear on how to answer the needs of each segment, ultimately aiding growth.
Eat, sleep, research, repeat!
Customer profiling is an easily repeatable process. By carrying it out on a regular basis, you’ll always be aware of any emerging trends and changes in attitudes among your customers or potential customers—and be in a good position to act on them.
Once you’ve created your working customer profiles, repeat as every year or two (how often will depend on how changeable your market is). With new competitors, new influencers and brand new customers all entering the market, the perceptions and status quos will shift with time.
Use the insights to inform your next research project
To quote ourselves:
‘Consumer profiling is often the first step brands take in their research process.’
With that mind, you’re in a prime position to run your next research project now that you’ve learned more about your target customers.
How top brands have used consumer profiling
Getting to know how your customers think, act and buy is essential to launching products and services they’ll actually want (and buy!).
Here’s how some top brands have used consumer profiling with incredible results.
