The B2B marketer’s latest, greatest BFF – or it should be! (Part I)

Sue Mizera, Propolis Ambassador, takes a deep dive into psychographics and why it should be a top priority for the savvy B2B marketer. Part I.

Even as B2B marketers’ roles expand and become ever more demanding — now including managing the tech stack, AI, aligning with sales for CX — a core marketing responsibility, priority and necessity remains that rarely gets any easier: achieving true customer-centricity.

It is delivered wisdom that an unalloyed customer focus should be grounded in, and burnished by, illuminating, differentiating customer insights. It is equally delivered wisdom that customer-centricity and insights should drive everything —most immediately, compelling communications and messages, with appropriate levels of emotion, tone and reason, across media. But customer-centricity should also build out to content, brand personality and market segmentation, and should touch on, if not fully inform, product development, customer experience, CRM/ABM and sales force guidance. Ultimately, customer-centricity should align with the business and should run right the way through everything, from company objectives and business growth to corporate ROI. Everything.

My experience, and you will correct me if I’m wrong, is that customer-centricity is more often a buzz-word than a precise tool; an imprecise and fuzzy concept vs. a finely defined statement that is commonly embraced and put to use across the company. Without genuine customer focus and insights, however, marketing and communications can be rudderless, even useless; skewing to becoming the “classic expense” vs. delivering “business-driving value;” all the while businesses suffer and opportunities go missing. But there is good news: Help is at hand, hidden in plain sight, in the form of psychographics.

Psychographics

“Psychographics,” you say? “Psychographics is for consumer marketing, it has been around for donkey’s years, I have no time for this since I already have mounds of data waiting for analysis, probably holding all the answers about customer insights that I will ever need.” Perhaps. First consider, however, that vs demographics, psychographics is concerned with people quâ people — their goals, motivations, and values. What makes them tick? What drives them in their daily choices, and preferences? What defines the kinds of lifestyles they choose for themselves and their families? Yes, psychographics is typically applied to consumers and their product and brand choices, but psychographics can be applied broadly to other domains, in particular to politics; importantly for our purposes, psychographics applies equally well to b2b professionals and practitioners and the choices and preferences they make in their professional lives. Why? Flash: you don’t leave who you are at the office door. Quite the contrary.

Full disclosure: I feel quite passionate about the value of psychographics to B2B marketers, although this value is still little acknowledged or properly understood and is certainly under-utilised; hence this article. I have written on psychographics in B2B, and how it has informed, and continues to inform, critical  marketing projects and business strategies for our B2B clients over many years. I always decline to mention the names of these clients because the results of our psychographic conclusions and applications are always proprietary: pure business strategy. I was recently buoyed by the publication in the Journal of Brand Strategy of an article concerning a healthcare provider (Kaiser Permanente) to both their B2B and B2B2C customers that leverages the use of psychographics to achieve demanding new business goals.. Good timing, there must be something psychographic in the air.

What follows

While there are a number of psychographics schemes, a 30-year veteran of Y&R, I regularly use Young & Rubicam’s 4Cs psychographics schema, standing for Cross-Cultural Consumer Characterisations, which is publicly available. In the piece that follows, I unpack the value of psychographics for B2B marketers while exploring these five topics:

1. What is psychographics, 4Cs-style, and how does it work?
2. Diving in, Having Some Fun: Familiarising Yourself with Psychographics, Immersing Yourself in Some of its Application
3. Business Cases:  B2B applications with long-term, serious, strategic results
4. Moving Forward; How you can determine your psychographic market segment(s) and start to communicate and message based on customer insights
5. Conclusions. Expect your findings to be transformative

I. What is psychographics, 4Cs-style, and how does it work?

Y&R’s 4Cs is a psychographics schema grounded in Maslow’s renowned hierarchy of needs. Y&R took this hierarchy and designed a probing research tool to find out where people around the world stood within it. While the system accepted that people from different countries are influenced by their differing cultural backgrounds, nonetheless, the research was able to remove the effect of the differences to focus on what was fundamentally uniting across human motivations. And so the schema was named the Cross-Cultural Consumer Characterisations, or 4Cs for short. The system provides a segmentation scheme powerful enough to segment people around the world and yet deep enough to understand everyone’s basic, human motivations. Because Y&R also asked what brands people bought and how they felt about them, linking 4Cs to the incomparable BrandAsset Valuator (BAV) consumer database, the system also becomes a way of understanding the deeper appeals of those brands and their corresponding personalities. Clearly, 4Cs has been equally commercial, brand and people-based from the start.

4Cs divides people into seven types, depending on their core or primary motivation.

Secondary motivations are typical, and can enrich profiles, but we are concerned here with primary motivations only. The seven types and their core motivations are:

• Explorers: Discovery
• Reformers: Enlightenment
• Succeeders: Control
• Aspirers: Status
• Mainstreamers: Security
• Resigned Poor: Survival
• Struggling Poor: Escape

While doubtless all seven profiles can be found in professional settings, four main types predominate: Explorers, Reformers, Succeeders and Mainstreamers, and we shall turn our focus to these alone. (Resigned and Struggling Poor are less evident in senior, decision-making ranks while Aspirers are more manifest for status-seeking.)

Explorers: Discovery

• These people are driven by a need for discovery, challenge and new frontiers.
• Young in spirit, if not in reality, Explorers are classic early-adopters, the first to try out new ideas and experiences.
• They tend to choose brands and experiences that highlight difference, sensation, adventure, indulgence and instant effect.
• These are high energy people, open to change and innovation, who seek autonomy, experiences, challenges and new frontiers.
• Many are prime practitioners of extreme sports.
• Their core need in life is for discovery— of the broader world, and of themselves as individuals.

Reformers: Enlightenment

• “Don’t tell me what to do or what to think” says the Reformer, valuing their own independent judgement.
• Reformers are the most anti-materialistic of the seven groups, although they are intolerant of bad taste and, unlike Explorers, will not buy things just because they are new.
• They tend to have higher educations and are often perceived as intellectual and being at the leading edge of society.
• They place high value in being socially aware, and pride themselves on being tolerant and using their time wisely.
• They favour brands and experiences that offer intrinsic quality, authenticity and natural simplicity, although they do tolerate complexity.
• Curious and enquiring people, they seek personal growth, harmony in their lives, and freedom from restrictions.
• Their core need in life is for enlightenment.

Succeeders: Control

• Succeeders possess self-confidence, have a strong goal orientation and tend to be very organised.
• Their strong work ethic prioritises precision, competence, fulfilling commitments, promptness, detail orientation as well as big-picture management.
• They value knowledge, achievements, experience and qualifications.
• As a result, they tend to occupy positions of responsibility in business and society. Their investment in the status quo means they tend to support it.
• When it comes to brands and experiences, they are middle-adopters — they take a “wait and see” approach before embracing the new.
• They look for reward and prestige in brands and experiences, and will often seek out the best, because that is what they feel they deserve.
• While their attitude to life is aggressive, they tend to be optimistic, positive people and value recharging and restoring themselves when they need to relax.
• Their core need in life is for control.

Mainstreamers: Security

• These are people who live in the world of the domestic and the everyday.
• They tend to be joiners and conformists for whom belonging to groups and communities provides purpose, direction and comfort.
• A daily routine is fundamental to the way they live their lives. Their life choices are ‘we’ rather than ‘me’.
• They are conventional, sentimental, followers vs. leaders, passive and habitual. They dislike standing-out.
• At the same time, they value loyalty, honesty, simplicity, straightforwardness, tradition and no-nonsense.
• As their name implies, they are the mainstream of society. They are the largest group of people within 4Cs across the world.
• They respond to big, established brands, to ‘family’ brands, and to offers of value for money.
• Their core need in life is for security.

Why are these four profiles so important?

Key take-aways and implications 

• One profile is not better, or more important, than another, they are just different.
• As you will soon see, all four profiles will be strongly present in professional and business settings.
• All will have different management styles, different decision making habits, different preferences and definitions of value for money.
• All will manifest their profiles through their core motivations, and show you their hands in their daily, professional practice  — and this is a gift to you, marketer! The gift of psychographics!
• The chief value of psychographics is that it can provide you with a short-hand “cheat sheet”, a quick leap to motivational insights, easily delivering on the 80/20% rule, if not more!
• Motivations as defined, ratified and quantified by psychographics, provide genuine, universally validated insights into what makes people — consumers, business professionals, people – tick.
• Once you know your customers’ key motivations, you are way down the lane towards identifying the insights that drive them and define them.
• Once you know their motivations, you have the basis to begin crafting meaningful, compelling, relevant messages to each.
• Or in other words, finely articulating what these motivations, values and goals mean to each of your customer types is the equivalent of insight-generated, fully differentiated messaging to them.

And you haven’t even left your desk yet!

II. Diving in, Having Some Fun: Familiarising Yourself with Psychographics, Immersing Yourself in Some of Its Applications

Now that we’ve identified the 4c style, it’s time to put the theory into a little practice. A little interactive interlude before plodding ahead with the finer points of psychographics applications and strategies. We offer you here four exercises, one building upon the other, so dive in, and have some fun while you familiarise yourself with 4cs-style psychographics. We’d like to hear from you: What did you learn? Were you surprised? 

1. Take the test yourself. 

What 4Cs type are you, or do you think you are? What type is your partner? Your family members? Your best friends? Do your evaluations illuminate anything about these important people in your life?

• Do they explain, perhaps, why certain of your family and friends get along, or don’t get along?
• For example, mixing Explorers with Mainstreamers can make for some awkward pauses in conversations. Mixing Reformers with Aspirers is even worse, although Succeeders typically blend well with everyone.

As we have noted, it’s possible to have strong secondary traits, so feel free to explore what these might be at this time.

2. Apply 4Cs profiles to your office mates. 

Building out your circle of contacts and acquaintances, what profiles best describe your key co-workers? Your boss? Your company’s management? As you no doubt can easily begin to identify the psychographics of the professional people around you on a daily basis, you see immediately how psychographics are present in an office and professional setting. People do not shed their psychographic selves, like heavy coats on a warm day, at the office door. On the contrary, people and their profiles are inseparable. You cannot take cream out of coffee. Leopards cannot change their spots.

Consider the following

• Do you have people in your office who ride their bikes to work? Do these people also tend to be interested in causes and social issues? What profile would they likely be? (Reformers)
• Contrast these with people who decorate their work areas with photos of children and family and are typically the first to volunteer to organise office events and birthday celebrations. Who are these folks? (Mainstreamers).
• You will surely have list-makers in your office, who literally cross-off tasks as they get finished during the day. Are these the same people who are sticklers for detail, and keen for meetings to start and finish on prescribed times? You surely know who these folds are (Succeeders).
• And then there may be co-workers who are the first to adopt new gadgets and technology and bring them into the office, after having spent their weekend doing extreme sports. Yes, these are the Explorers.

Will you have all four major profiles always present? No, surely not. At the office, you may be mostly Succeeders or Mainstreamers, that’s quite common, but this, of course, begins to speak more broadly about your company culture and company core values. Yes, psychographics can certainly help to define the ethos of a company, the type of people who gravitate to the company, the profiles of people you are looking to hire in the future. The applications of psychographics just get richer and richer.

3. Apply 4Cs profiles to these well-known business figures

Building out your growing psychographic expertise, based on what you know and read about them, what primary psychographic profiles do you think best capture these internationally known business figures? As they are all in the public domain, pretty much on a daily basis, it is fair to cite them as examples in this exercise.

• Elon Musk
• Jeff Bezos
• Steve Jobs
• Bill Gates
• Warren Buffett
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Tim Cook
• George Soros
• Richard Branson

While it is impossible to be absolutely certain of their psychographic types, and we can allow for differences of opinion; still, going through the exercise itself points instantly to different psychographic profiles coming to life among these notable figures. Do you, perhaps, even detect their profiles informing the companies they run, the philanthropy they support? Are the same strong goals, motivations and values evident in both founder and foundation? In my experience, the imprint of the owner/founder on their company, its culture, values and development, is often quite manifest; the rule, not the exception. (We could go into great detail here about Walt Disney and his creations, but this for another exploration.)

As for the list, how did you see them? What do you think? Are some more obvious than others? I offer my take in (bolded) top-line observations, backed up by in-detail profiles drawn from basic online searches.

Two are Reformers Seeking Enlightenment

Having co-founded Microsoft almost on a series of dares, Bill Gates famously exited MS age 45 to dedicate himself full-time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, now the world’s largest private charity. George Soros, age 93, continues to head the Soros Foundation, proceeds from which allow him to be “the most generous giver” within his billionaire cohort.

Bill Gates

After having created Microsoft, at a quite early age (45) Gates stepped down from his executive positions at MS to turn his attention full-time to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The world’s largest private charity, the Foundation is today concerned with climate change, global health and development, and education. He reportedly loves programming for its own sake, not for the money he has earned. His algorithm for pancake sorting as a solution to one of a series of unsolved problems that he presented in a combinatorics class at Harvard remained the fastest version for 30+ years; its successor is only faster by 2%.

George Soros

Age 93, the 22nd richest person in the world, George Soros is a celebrated hedge fund tycoon; famous as the “man who broke the Bank of England” by shorting the British pound, he netted a profit of $1B in a day. His training as a forex trader helped to prepare him for this challenge. Through Soros Fund Management (1970), he invests globally in a wide range of investment strategies and asset classes including equities, credit, fixed income, macro and private equity. His global macro strategy makes massive, one-way bets on the movements of currency rates, commodity prices, stocks, bonds, derivatives and other assets, based on macro-economic analyses. Forbes has called him “the most generous giver” (among the billionaires ‘club of givers’) in terms of consistently donating 1% of his net worth. Over time his net worth is $8.6B, his donations $32B.

One is a Mainstreamer Seeking Security

Very different to his agemate George Soros’s approach, Warren Buffett’s approach to trading remains pointedly safe and simple as he eschews complicated investment tools and strategies. Humble, frugal and yet acknowledged to be the best stock trader of all time, Buffett is a true son of the US midwest, itself a bastion of mainstream values and beliefs.

Are Mainstreamers rare in business management? No. Countless, mostly anonymous, Mainstreamer professionals the world over populate mid-size family businesses and family offices, notably among them companies in Germany’s mittelstand.

Warren Buffett

The Chair of Berkshire Hathaway, continually ranked one of the world’s top 5 most wealthy people, Mr. Buffett, age 92, is a born and bred mid-westerner, popularly known as the Sage, or Oracle, of Omaha, Nebraska. (America’s heartland is itself famously a source of mainstream lifestyles and values.) Entrepreneurial from childhood, he took early jobs as a newspaper-delivery boy, worked in his grandfather’s grocery store and sold Coke and chewing gum in sidewalk concession stands. He sought out Benjamin Graham at Columbia University to study with, because of his investment philosophy, called fundamental or value investing, which Buffett practices to this day: “see stocks as a business, use market fluctuations to your advantage, seek a margin of safety.” In strong contrast to his age-mate George Soros, Buffett always prefers “simple index funds” to more complicated hedge funds and eschews investment banks. He remains the best stock trader of all time, with $102.5B in assets, 4-5 times more than the next, most successful traders.

SMEs, Mittelstand 

Arguably there are also countless, mostly anonymous mainstreamers, who as specialists and professionals populate the ranks of companies and businesses around the world. These are typically owner/founders of family businesses, or managers of family offices; notable among these are the varied and economically powerful businesses of the German mittelstand.

Two are Succeeders Seeking Control

On a mission to outperform from an early age, Jeff Bezos applies total control and attention to detail to all his endeavors. His mantra: Get Big Fast. Tim Cook is committed to diligence and hard work, personally and professionally. At Apple, he has set and achieved numerous, varied and rigorous corporate goals – social, environmental, financial.

Jeff Bezos

Bezos seems to have been on a mission to succeed, achieve, outperform and win from an early age. In high school, he was the valedictorian of his class with a National Merit Scholarship; at Princeton he graduated phi beta kappa, summa cum laude. Driven by a need for total control and attention to detail, he has been called ”a brilliant, mysterious, cold-blooded, corporate titan, “quantitative and data-driven.” who “talks in lists and criteria ranked by priorities for every decision he makes.” He takes a long-term view of success, citing his mantra to “Get Big Fast” in order to achieve and maintain market dominance. He believes in a work life “harmony” vs. balance as work and life, for him, blend and are as inseparable, well, as cream in a coffee. Figures he admires include Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase and Big Iger of Disney, also arguably Succeeders.

Tim Cook

CEO of Apple since 2011, Tim Cook was hand-picked to be COO of the company by Steve Jobs himself. He looked at Jobs’ offer to join Apple, requiring him to leave a very secure, more comfortable position at Compaq, as a challenge he couldn’t refuse: “a once in a lifetime opportunity to work for a creative genius and be on an executive team to resurrect a great American company.” Since 2011, Cook has established a number of rigorous, corporate goals — political reformation of international and domestic surveillance, cybersecurity, American manufacturing, and environmental preservation. He has also doubled the company’s revenue and profit (2011-2020) and increased the market value of the company from $348B to $1.9 trillion. Cook is a fitness enthusiast, favouring hiking, cycling and gymnastics. He begins sending emails at 4:30am and holds Sunday night conferences with his teams to prepare for the week. He believes “preparation and hard work are necessary to execute on intuition.”

Three are Explorers Seeking Discovery

Elon Musk, Steve Jobs and Richard Branson are all equally iconic, iconoclastic Explorers. Restless, rebellious, highly individualistic and idiosyncratic, they possess imaginations that know few bounds. Continual discovery is everything.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk is today the world’s wealthiest man. Controversial, iconoclastic, eccentric, spontaneous and not least polarising for his endeavours, political views and management style, Musk is seemingly unstoppable in his quests for discovery, invention, innovation and pushing limits to extremes. The list of his creations, and the impact they have already made on the world, make the case: Zip2 (internet city guide with maps, directions, yellow pages, marketed to newspapers; morphed to x.com and PayPal that inspired his idea for X, the everything app;) SpaceX (first private company to put astronauts in orbit and dock a crewed spacecraft with the International Space Station;) StarLink (low-earth-orbit satellites for satellite internet access;) Tesla (electric cars); Neural Link (neuro-technology start-up to integrate the human brain with AI);  Boring Company (tunnels for underground, high occupancy, high speed, mass transportation); Twitter, now X; xAI (competitor to Chat GPT.) He admittedly has launched ambitious, risky, and costly projects against his advisors’ recommendations. He has little interest in the material trappings of wealth and accumulates resources “for humanity’s outward expansion to space.”

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is an iconic pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 70s and 80s. He was largely responsible for reviving Apple when the company was on the verge of bankruptcy; the revival began with the iconic, iconoclastic “Think Different” campaign — at once a challenge to IBM’s “think” and a snub to conventional grammar — and led to the Apple Store, the Apple Store (iOS), iMax, iPad, iPod, iPhone, iTunes and iTunes Store. A rebellious youth, Jobs had difficulty in traditional classrooms, admittedly resisted authority figures, misbehaved, and grew his hair long in protest. A committed individualist — “a brain, a nerd, a hippie, an intellectual” – in 1974, he travelled through India with the express purpose of seeking enlightenment and discovery and returned to the US, whereupon he joined a farm commune; Zen and Buddhism would later influence his philosophy of design and the look and feel of his products.

With Steve Wozniak, and their famed incident of the blue boxes — wherein they generated enough color tones to manipulate a telephone network to make free, long-distance calls, which service they sold forward clandestinely and profitably — Jobs realised electronics could be fun and profitable and that you could take on large corporations and win. He acknowledged: “If not for the blue boxes, there wouldn’t have been an Apple.” Perhaps his most pivotal, iconoclastic position — his own moment of “Think Different”— was against John Scully. Appointed CEO over Jobs, Scully wanted an open architecture of business and product models that targeted education, small businesses and home markets less vulnerable to IBM. Jobs, ever the individualist, wanted a closed  architecture as a business alternative to the IBM PC. The rest is history. Jobs holds 450 patents, 141 issued since his death. His chief discoveries were not as a programmer, but rather as a designer and a marketer.

Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson is arguably another iconoclastic Explorer, who challenged a series of mainline businesses and industries in his career — from British Air to Coke to space tourism— and mostly won. His Virgin Group today includes 400 companies in various fields, and he is duly famous for his contributions in Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records, Virgin Rail, and Virgin Galactic. Notable failures include Virgin Cola, Virgin Cars, Virgin Publishing, Virgin Clothing and Virgin Bride. But he is an indomitable optimist: “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling down.”

Leaving one, Mark Zuckerberg. Where did you place him?

I found Mark Zuckerberg difficult to profile. For all his iconic, iconoclastic breakthroughs, he seems equally mission-driven and yet fully methodical, in control, detail-oriented and precise as he moves forward. Sometimes individuals can present a mix of psychographic profiles- Explorer, Succeeder and Reformer — all in one.

At age 23, Zuckerberg the world’s youngest, self-made billionaire. He began using computers and writing software in middle school, and it was said, while some kids play computer games, Mark created them. By the time he entered Harvard in 2002, he had achieved a reputation as a programming prodigy. He thinks of himself as a hacker because “it’s okay to break things to make them better. You can build something in a night, hence a “hackathon.” This thinking is core to Zuckerberg’s, and Facebook’s, personality.

One of his biggest regrets is that he competed in university in fencing and not wrestling. Since 2022, he took up the challenge of training in Mixed Martial Arts and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He loves both sports and in May, 2023, he won Silver and Gold in white belt competitions and was promoted to blue belt by the Brazilians. At the same time, he is passionate about open communication, and has presented his opinions and defended them before the US Congress. It’s not the money, he echoes other billionaires. “The most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people. What I care about is the mission — making the world open.” Sometimes you encounter a mix of psychographic profiles— Explorer, Succeeder, Reformer — in one.

Key takeaways:

• If ever there was proof that psychographics is alive and well and living in professional and business contexts, this evaluation offers manifest evidence.
• There is no one right way of doing things: you can equally be a Mainstreamer financier or an Explorer marketer, a Succeeder programmer or a Reformer engineer.
• Success clearly depends on following your own intrinsic strengths and the drumbeat of your own, personal missions. Which are, of course, very different, person to person.
• Further inspection would reveal that the imprint of the founder marks, stamps and informs virtually every aspect of the companies and foundations they create. This is for another, longer discussion.

III. Apply 4Cs to these B2B award-winning advertising campaigns 

Finally, let’s spotlight advertising and watch it at work. The following are the 2023 Cannes-Lion-winning, B2B campaigns that, upon analysis, can be seen to have different psychographic profiles in their sights. We are not saying that these campaigns were created with psychographic profiles in mind — maybe yes, maybe no. They certainly represent emotions and insight-driven messaging and positioning, however, that are doubtless a prime reason for their impact and success.

I offer the same challenge — Which psychographic profile do you think each best targets? I offer my observations for each.

1. B2B Creative Grand Prix winner: Earth

The Brazilian Stock Exchange and the UN Global Impact placed Earth on the Brazilian Stock Exchange to raise awareness of the planet’s most pressing problems. Described as the “world’s most urgent IPO,” the campaign highlights issues plaguing humanity that businesses can assist with.

In my view, this campaign screams Reformer: issues, causes, the environment, partnerships, working toward a common language and common purpose, Can enlightenment be far behind?

2. B2B Creative Gold Winner (1): Certified Human 

Intel’s mission was to enhance its reputation by showcasing how its Xeon processors and AI expertise directly address the deep fake crisis.

In my view, this campaign is pure Succeeder. Its tone is serious and thoughtful. The young presenter is credible, confident and passionate about her work. She demonstrates knowledge, achievements and qualifications. The basis of the campaign is science, logic and data, marshalled to solve critical problems facing anyone whoever goes online. Her solution affords control and mastery.

3. B2B Creative Gold Winner (2): Rock Star 

Workday’s Rock Star, showcasing renowned musicians Ozzy Osbourne, Billy Idol, Paul Stanley and Gary Clark, humorously depicts their confusion over why people in regular jobs label themselves rock stars.

In my view, Rock Star is all Mainstreamer. The campaign gently sends-up company rank and file, joiners, conformists and “we vs. me”-types, and pulls them out of their collective comfort zones, by challenging their values and common language. What binds them, their sense of community, becomes a simple, easy, humorous target in this, and everyone’s ad.

Key takeaways:

Psychographic applications run all through business — let’s just take this as a given.

It’s high time to move on from the debate that still rages on whether B2B communications should use emotions or emotional appeals in campaigns.

It’s not just about emotions in advertising, it’s which emotions!

• Enlightenment and authenticity to reach Reformers, as in Earth
• Control, science, data, ingenuity and a passion for solutions to speak to Succeeders, as in Certified Human
• Secure comfort zones and common, communal language and behaviour, only to burst these – albeit gently and humorously – to reach Mainstreamers, as in Rock Star.

Imagine what these award-winning campaigns would look like if there were no emotions, or motivations, or insights, in them! For sure, we wouldn’t be talking about them because they would never have reached Cannes Lion considerations, much less the top prizes.

In Part 2 we shall complete this article, exploring the following topics:

• III. Business Cases: B2B applications with long-term, serious, strategic results.
• Moving Forward; How you can determine your psychographic market segment(s) and start to communicate and message based on customer insights
• Conclusions. Expect your findings to be transformative