by Bambos Neophytou.

The combining trends of social-commerce and increasingly accurate user-data will enable highly targeted campaigns for socially connected audiences or small groups of friends.

Earlier this year, I made a number of predictions for 2012, one which we have already seen evidence of, which was the return of heritage formats: articles in the British press last week reported how “A spokesman for HMV has said that the high street chain is planning to step up the amount of vinyl it stocks in response to demand from customers.”

Another trend Inferno is confident we will see realised this year is the one we called ‘Friendship Groups are the New Target Audiences’. What we mean is that marketing departments and agencies will create products, offers, campaigns aimed at discreet and specifically identified groups of individuals who are connected socially based on four key motivations:

1. Widespread dissatisfaction with current consumer targeting models
2. Social media makes newer targeting possible (Youtube, Flikr, Facebook, Twitter,etc)
3. Advanced analytics deliver increasingly accurate data on coherent social groups (statistical analysis, predictive modelling, behavioural targetting)
4. The irrefutable logic that trusted peer recommendation (word of mouth from your family and friends) is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchase

Even a brief discussion of each of these ingredients, would be beyond the scope of this piece, so let’s assume 1 and 2 are understood and accepted and deal with the plugging in of the old truth of 4 into the modern marketing engineering of 3.

The truest truism is sometimes the least fashionable thing to say. No one gets a applauded for pointing out that word-of-mouth recommendation is the biggest single influence on brand behaviour and purchases. But this is the crux of why targeting friendship groups make so much sense.

By targeting comparatively small groups of peers through social digital media, brands have never been in a better place to use the overwhelmingly powerful force of peer-endorsed recommendation and mutual endorsement.

How this plugs into 3 can be seen in how the advanced analytics is quietly and behind the scenes revolutionising how we do marketing. Advanced analytics is being used to model customer data and make accurate predictions about which messages, channels and offers are more likely to elicit positive responses from the audience.

An example, on a macro scale, is Adobe’s use of the tools made available to it through the company called MarketShare Analytics to optimise its marketing activity on a weekly basis to reach its targets. For an example on a micro scale take a look at the examination of how time, weather and mood (among other variables) can all be factored into mobile behavioural targeting in the ‘Next Best Offer’ article (Harvard Business Review, Dec. 2011). Reaching individuals with personalised offers at the right time (so often thought of as the Holy Grail in promotional marketing) is not only within reach, but is being practised as we speak by the cutting edge people in your field.

The next obvious step is to tailor offers to the shared interests of a group of friends.  Social media community managers working on behalf of brands already identify coherent groups within their followers and friends. All it takes is for the visionary marketing/product clients to produce assets designed to the uniquely detailed understanding that community managers can give them of the groups available to talk to.

And so back to ingredient number 1: There has always been something vaguely unsatisfactory with the idea of ‘the target consumer’. Apart from being a fiction made up of patches of statistical data, it rarely does the main task it is supposed to, that is create a clear target for communications and marketing activity. Instead, it fills the world with jargonistic labels for demographic groups and spurious pen-portraits of no-one in particular. But it is the ‘particular’ that characterises and defines us as individuals who respond to marketing messages. Roderick White has written eloquently about this: “within a given category market, true segmentation is hard to discern: on most criteris customers of competing brands are broadly similar … segmentation is not just frustrating but pointless and has been roundly condemned in the academic literature as technically unsound” (Roderick White in Admap, quoted in  Guilt Trip, Hesz & Neophytou, 2010, p.76).

But perhaps, like ethical foreign policies and benevolent banks, the target consumer is a myth most of us dangerous free-thinkers can abandon.  By targeting real people in their real social groups we can lead the way forward. Both the ability of the marketing community to engage with individuals and the explicit opting in by individuals to commercial messaging has never been greater. So it is up to those who can see this opportunity to make it happen.

Bambos Neophytou is head of strategy at Inferno.