Audience Segmentation

Sony Music provided Other lines of enquiry with a fairly broad brief; they wanted to get under the skin of music listeners in markets as diverse as the UK, Norway and Finland. They wanted a route-map to successfully reach and target consumers with different musical tastes.

Plan

Other lines of enquiry set out to provide Sony with a measure of the potential market for any of its artists, and to deliver a life-like picture of the audiences that might drive demand for new emerging bands.

We used a unique market segmentation tool that focused on the very personal relationships people have with specific fields of entertainment. Our process defined how engaged a target consumer was with different musical genres and moods, and acted as a strong predictor of future consumer behaviour.

Results

Our analysis positioned consumers along a ‘music engagement spectrum’ that ranges from Fanatics to Indifferents. It did this by measuring two key elements that determine consumer behaviour:

• How passionate a person felt about music - was their passion all-consuming or did they have little or no interest at all?
• How much time, effort and money was a person willing to invest in musical products or content - was he or she a heavy consumer with discriminating tastes who took great care over what they consume, or were they a disinterested light consumer who could only be tempted if the price was right and access was stress-free?

This 'music engagement spectrum' was then further segmented by interest in musical genres, musical mood styles and demographics to create a 'market map'. Once the segments were built, we were able to paint a compelling and life-like picture of each group.