The five layers
A complete analysis answers five questions. Many stop after the first, which is why so many strategy documents describe an audience that could be almost anyone.
- Demographics. Age, gender, household. Necessary, but the layer with the least decision value.
- Geography. Where the audience actually concentrates, down to region or postal code rather than country.
- Interests and affinities. What else the audience engages with more than average. This is the layer that produces partnership and messaging decisions.
- Media behaviour. Which channels reach them and which do not.
- Development. Whether the audience is growing, flat or contracting, which a single snapshot cannot show.
Survey-based and behaviour-based analysis
The two approaches answer different questions well. Survey research can ask why: motivations, attitudes, stated preference, on a sample of a few thousand. Behaviour-based analysis observes what people actually did, at a much larger scale and finer geographic resolution, but it cannot ask a question.
A practical division: use behavioural data to decide where and with whom, use survey research to understand why. Problems begin when one is asked to do the other’s job. More in behavioural data vs panel research.
Common mistakes
- No baseline. “62% of our audience is male” means nothing until it is compared with the category or the population. Without a reference, every figure is decoration.
- One market treated as all markets. Audiences differ by country in composition, not only in size. A German profile used to plan a Spanish campaign will be wrong in ways nobody notices until results come in.
- Describing customers instead of the audience. Analysing existing buyers describes who was already won. It leaves out the people growth has to come from.
How Rascasse uses it
Rascasse builds audience profiles from aggregated digital behaviour signals, not surveys, separately for each country, in 200+ countries. A profile covers all five layers with 100,000+ data points, down to postal code where available, with up to ten years of history and quarterly updates. A new audience can be defined and is live in 24 hours.
Related use cases: Audience Profiling, Segmentation & Personas, Market Sizing & Potential.