Broad category audience tools
Why category audiences?
At Zappi, we always recommend that you survey an audience that contains the broadest definition of your category's target customer. This is beneficial for a number of reasons, including:
- More broadly comparable datasets unlock more robust normative comparisons, and sooner
- Since you aren't eliminating as many potential audience members, whitespace identification becomes feasible, more quickly
- Using appropriately large sample sizes, profiling and filters become powerful tools for further segmenting and comparing audiences within the same datasets - so you don't sacrifice specificity in your analysis
Tools that use broad category audiences
Zappi tools that use this category approach are:
- The Amplify System
- Activate It
- Prioritize It
How category audiences work on our tools
We've designed these tools to build up databases quickly and on a more consistent sample frame, rather than on a fully custom audience and category combination. In these tools, there is a high degree of standardization at the category level, and the category's definition is the vehicle for that. In addition to the usual norm functions, these categories to some degree drive:
- Audience: We define as broad an audience screener as can apply to the category in question (i.e., "Salty Snack Consumers" for the Salty Snack category) and all our users then standardize on it.
- The extent to which your organization can customize the audience beyond the standard on category audience tools depends on a number of factors, but is generally limited in order to attain the benefits laid out above. Please reach out to your Zappi team to explore what options are available to you.
- Category Constants: snippets of text and answer lists, which are piped into the survey (i.e., the consumption word for the category ’eat’, ‘drink’, ‘use’ and the list of relevant brands.)
- Weighting: where it is activated, category-level weighting is done against the Category Usage Frequency, so that all surveys run in a given category and country use a dynamic norm for a more stable sample. Brand-level weighting is also done against the Brand Usage Frequency. Brand-level weighting is also done against the Brand Usage Frequency.
- Associated translations: the translations of constants (or whole sentences which include constants) are saved against the category.