The article is about special attention that is paid to the target audience research while creating a brand.
Branding professionals need to understand for whom the brand is being created. What is the customer used to seeing? How does he live and what does he dream about? What needs does he have, what drives him, what attributes does he surround himself with? Branding should solve the tasks and needs of the target audience core. To answer these questions, certain tools are used. This article will show you what they are.

What is customer profiling?

Consumer profiling is an image of a person that includes psychographic, behavioral, demographic, social, ethnic, economic characteristics. This is a marketing tool.
A customer is a buyer, visitor, target audience of a product or service.

Customer profiling is especially needed:

• when launching a new product, since the brand is always built pointwise;
• when rebranding an existing product or service;
• when you need to segment the audience, make a description of the target audience, define who the target audience is, who is the potential audience is. You can’t create a brand for everyone;
• when creating a strategy for brand promotion and development.

Most often the profiling is used when creating a new brand and rebranding. When a branding strategist has resulted in customer profiling, one can safely create a brand platform. Later, copywriters and designers create a verbal and visual identity taking into account the TA profiling.

Why should a business know its customers?

People are so different, but at the same time, there are characteristics that unite them in certain groups by interests, lifestyle, goals, needs and more. For example, some people want to be famous and demonstrate their life in detail in every possible way on social media. Others prefer to keep their privacy away from prying eyes. This information is useful and helps to create a behavioral profile.

Every product, company, any field of activity needs a deep understanding of its consumer. Possessing data about what needs the client has, what he dreams about, what problems he is facing, the company can draw up the necessary commercial proposal — a product that solves the needs of the target audience.

If you don’t know who the buyer is, the product will either fail in the market, or the company will invest too many resources in the promotion, increasing the marketing budget.

Building a profile will help:

• to create the right product and correctly draw up an offer to the buyer;
• to get a loyal, regular customer, build long-term relationships with him;
• to reduce the marketing budget;
• to increase margins and profitability (the client is willing to pay for value and emotion);
• to increase brand value;
• to identify the main channels of product promotion (where the customer is present).

Preparation stage before creating a customer profile: key questions to ask at the start

1. What are the strong qualities of my product or service?
It is necessary to determine the strongest characteristic (or create it if it is absent). USP will help differentiate the product from competitors, show the consumer the reason why he should buy the product.
2. Who is the buyer of this product or service?

If a product is just being created, you can choose an audience and create it for the specific needs of specific people. If the product already exists on the market and has the target audience, these people are being studied. Psychographic, behavioral characteristics are more useful for brand specialists because they describe the drivers and values of the audience.
Example:

• Novice restaurateurs/managers/representatives of small businesses
  They dream of becoming professionals in HoReCa and developing their business.
  They do not always understand what exactly can help them. They need information about the industry and need to understand trends and be acquainted with current technologies.
  They want to join the professional community, learn the opinion of reputable experts.
• Conference/Event Attendees
  Energetic and ambitious managers/businessmen.
  They experience a lack of time but are open to new opportunities. They make decisions independently. They look for inspiration, interesting people.

As you can see, this description reflects the problems, needs of the audience.

Most briefs filled out by customers contain only socio-demographic characteristics.

• Women, 25-50 years old
  Income is average and above average. Family people who sometimes travel.

Such a description of the consumer is uninformative in terms of drivers and emotions

3. Where is the potential customer?
You need to find out where he lives, works, what places he visits. Geographical information is often available on social networks.

4. What problems/issues does he regularly face?
The problem of lack of time can form the basis of branding, for example, for a cleaning company.

Source data for creating a customer profile

How to make up a target audience profile?
First step: information should be distributed. For convenience, you can create a table of a profile with the following columns:

• Needs and desires
• Pain and problems
• Age
• Gender
• Geographical location
• Job position
• Hobbies
• Income level
• Attributes
• Relaxation
• Adherents of brands

Men, 23–35 years old. Residents of big cities. Married, often having 1 child in the family. They are fond of software development, obsessed with the digital realm. In their free time, they prefer active leisure activities. They are active on social media. They cannot tolerate bureaucracy. They are driven by interesting large-scale projects that bring real benefits. It is important that everyone notices their achievements.

Step-by-step guide on creating a customer profile from Linnikov Agency

In our agency, a TA profile is created at the stage of research and analytics. This is the initial stage in branding. You can see a description of all the stages of building a brand using the link

Before creating a profile, we carry out a briefing of our client in order to understand what business tasks and goals the branding should solve, what the result our client wants. Most often, an in-depth interview is used to understand the goals of the client.
The second step is research and analytics:

• product — strengths, and opportunities that the company has;
• trends, information on what stage the market is at;
• competitors — their strengths and weaknesses are studied, what they do not allow their consumer to get is determined;
• target audience. Information is structured according to characteristics based on qualitative and quantitative studies.

Quantitative research allows you to measure mainly socio-demographic parameters. Qualitative research — psychography (determine the psychotype), behavioral motives, goals, desires, drivers, problems, and needs. The most effective qualitative research tool is an in-depth interview. A psychological type is a system of individual attitudes and behavioral stereotypes designed to explain the difference between people.

Sometimes, after the research phase, we may offer our client to adjust business goals.

A consumer profile is an example that will help reduce your marketing budget.
A client is building the highest hotel in the world, Burj Boutique.

Go to the case page

During the research, the core of the TA was determined:

• Individual tourists, couples, 33–45 years old, with an active lifestyle.
• They travel and collect experiences.
• Independent, ambitious.
• They value comfort and exclusivity and love to be the first.

In addition to the verbal description of the profile, it is important to create a visual image. We create a mood board, which includes images (photos) of typical representatives of the target audience, their lifestyle, the things they use: everything that makes up a complete picture of the world of these people. The more complete the description and mood board of the consumer, the easier it is to build a development strategy, promotion, brand platform in the future and solve other problems for which a customer profile is needed.