By Emma Roberts, Insights & Strategy Lead at O.agency
All too often we hear people say “we want to target Gen Z” with our marketing campaigns.
We believe that stereotyping entire generations isn’t a strategy, because today’s consumers don’t fit into neat demographic boxes.
As the digital landscape becomes more nuanced, the old ways of targeting no longer deliver. Understanding and engaging with audiences through the lens of behavioural Tribes allows marketers to:
Identify the emotional, cultural, and contextual drivers behind purchase decisions.
Create marketing strategies that meet audiences where they are digitally, socially, and psychologically.
Make use of real-time insights to evolve campaigns in step with consumer expectations.
At O.agency, we help brands get under the skin of their audiences, and truly understand what makes them tick, not just who they are on paper. We turn these insights into sharper messaging, stronger community engagement and smarter social media strategy. By moving beyond demographics and into the realm of real human behaviour, we offer a firmer foundation for long-term brand building.
We work together with marketers to decode their audience, define their Tribes, and design a strategy that keeps up with the future of consumer culture.
Social media is the obvious place to reach a younger target audience like Gen Z for example, but it’s no longer an easy place to map your audiences. Social media is actually a plethora of channels with differing behaviours in how people engage, so the likes of age, gender and location are not enough to grow your brand.
The average internet user now spends over two hours a day on social media (GWI), switching between 7+ platforms every month.
There is a broad spectrum of change that has shifted dramatically in recent months from constantly updating algorithms to polarised echo chambers. This shift is full of opportunity but will be difficult to navigate for brands that are operating on outdated customer persona maps.
The landscape has shifted. We’re no longer marketing to audiences with fixed traits. We’re marketing to mindsets, behaviours and real-time contexts.
It’s time to get more nuanced with marketing segmentation and become much more effective.
Social Tribes is our new insights report set to widen your understanding of audiences based on how they behave, not just who they are on paper.
We’ve identified six Social Tribes dominating the way people consume content and connect with brands online:
Latent Voyeurs – the silent scrollers who never like or follow, but see everything.
Experience Collectors – here for the memory, not the merch.
Keyboard Conscious – valuesled, publicly vocal and allergic to greenwashing.
Scroll Hardened – desensitised digital natives who demand humour, chaos or novelty.
Identity Seekers – using brands to project a curated version of self.
Community Catalysts – seeking belonging, feedback and shared purpose.
In our report we explore each Tribe in detail to discover:
Engagement styles.
Motivators to purchase or interact.
Brand strategy recommendations.
Real-world brands getting it right.
We recommend anyone designing a marketing strategy today follows these four key steps:
Embrace behavioural segmentation as standard.
Rethink how we define and interpret engagement.
Build creative and campaigns with platform-specific context in mind.
Let go of personas that were built five years ago (and never updated).
Our Social Tribes report is your guidebook to doing just that.
Email emma@o.agency for a copy