Targeting with HomeScores vs. Demographic and Geo-Demographic Targeting
Despite numerous advancements in the amount and type of market information available, many firms continue to target customers based solely on the limited insight offered by the demographic targeting of geographies (i.e. the underlying demographics of a city, town or even zip code). There are two major flaws inherent in this approach. First, demographic characteristics are by nature unique for each household and as such, using information that summarizes those characteristics together to represent a larger area loses valuable information and perhaps insight into smaller groups of valuable customers. Second, demographic targeting alone without actual and reliable data on the communications behavior of the households requires assumptions that may or may not be true (e.g., customers with high income are the best targets.) These decisions are too important to base on assumptions.
Another common targeting approach claims to mitigate the effects of the problems above by performing analysis of geographic areas by categorizing the areas into pre-defined groups or segments. While these approaches may include more information than demographic targeting alone, they fail to overcome the central flaw of grouping all customers in an area into one behavior profile. Are your needs the same as your neighbors purely because you live in close proximity? How often do your buying behaviors match your neighbors'? While they may sometimes match, household services such as telecom, Internet and video services are based on many factors for each household, and not simply on the neighborhood you live in.
The Solution: HomeScores
HomeScores tackle all of these challenges by:
Providing estimates of behavior at the individual household level
Utilizing the largest syndicated telecom data source available to drive the household models, including actual behavior data from Bill Harvesting®
Delivering actual estimates of telecom behavior vs. only the household demographics
