GB531 Unit 4 Audience Profile Example

Who Is Written Out and Who Remains: A Unit 4 Audience Profile for a Wall-Mounted Home Battery

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB531: Advertising

Unit 4 Audience Profile

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The battery brand, the market counts and every estimate are composite and illustrative; the sources cited are real.

Table 1: The Exclusion Table

The starting point is every adult from 35 through 64 living in the three markets, about 3.94 million people in composite estimates. Each cut has a reason.

1. Keep only owners of detached homes. Renters cannot install a wall-mounted battery, and condominium owners usually cannot alter shared electrical systems. Remaining: about 1.76 million adults in owner-occupied detached homes. This is the media universe, the group media buying will be measured against.

2. Remove households with a permanent standby generator. These households, about 9 percent of the universe, already have automatic backup power and rarely refuel by hand. Remaining: about 1.60 million.

3. Remove households that expect central air conditioning to run during an outage. A standard Quietwall installation powers essential circuits, such as refrigeration, lights, fans, communications and medical devices, but not whole-house central air. Homeowners who say they would not accept an outage without central air, about 27 percent of those remaining, would be disappointed by the product. Remaining: about 1.17 million.

4. Keep those who kept a portable generator running during an outage in the last five years. These homeowners, about 38 percent of those remaining, know the fuel problem from experience. Remaining: about 444,000 adults. This is the message audience, the people the creative is written for.

By market, the message audience is about 246,000 in Houston, 138,000 in Tampa-St. Petersburg and 60,000 in New Orleans.

The media universe and the message audience are different groups on purpose: the campaign pays to reach 1.76 million homeowners but speaks to the 444,000 who have stood in a gas line.

Why Two Audiences

Media cannot be bought against a past behavior such as running a generator, so the campaign buys against homeowners in detached homes. But the creative is written for the narrower group, because a message aimed at everyone would say nothing to anyone. Belch and Belch (2021) distinguish the target audience for a message from the broader market that media will reach, and note that the creative must work for the core target while not repelling others in the media universe.

The Profile

Who they are. Mostly couples and families in middle age, in suburban detached homes valued around the regional median. Many have lived through at least two long outages. Household incomes are middle to upper-middle, enough to consider a battery with financing but not enough to make the purchase casual.

What they remember. Hauling fuel containers, queuing at the few stations that still had power, refueling the generator in the dark, worrying about carbon monoxide and listening to the noise all night. Several interviewees described setting phone alarms to refuel every few hours.

What they believe about batteries. That they are expensive, that they may not last a long outage, and that they are mainly for people with solar panels. The objectives memo found that only 17 percent link Quietwall with needing no fuel.

What they value. Reliability, protecting family members, especially older parents and children, and avoiding the work of keeping a generator running.

Where they are reachable. Local television news and weather, especially in hurricane season; connected TV through streaming services; streaming audio during commutes; local news and weather websites when storms approach; and mail at home.

Who influences them. Electricians, neighbors who have installed batteries and, for some, insurance agents.

A Portrait for the Creative Team

Steel (1998) argues that planners should give creative teams a picture of a real person rather than a list of statistics, because people write better advertising for someone they can imagine. For this campaign, that person is a homeowner in a Houston suburb who, during the last long outage, drove twice a day to find a station with power, waited behind dozens of cars and refilled a generator on the back porch at two in the morning. The person does not need to be told outages are bad. They need to believe there is a way to never make that drive again.

How the Profile Shapes the Campaign

The message audience's defining memory is the fuel run, so the creative leads with it, as the brief's proposition does. The media plan will buy against the universe but weight vehicles, such as local weather coverage, that over-index on homeowners who follow storms closely. Sharp (2010) argues that brands grow mainly by reaching many category buyers, including light ones, which supports buying broadly against the universe even though the creative speaks to the core.

What the Profile Leaves Out

Homeowners without generators who simply dread outages may also buy, especially in New Orleans, where outages last longest. They are in the media universe but not the message audience, and the campaign should accept them as a secondary group rather than design for them. Medical-device households, for whom backup power is essential, are an important subgroup within the message audience and deserve a separate mailer.

Limits

The percentages behind each cut are composite estimates from a small survey and public housing data. They should be updated with the April survey's results before media is bought, and the size of the generator-owning group should be checked against retail sales data for portable generators in the three markets.

References

Belch, G. E., & Belch, M. A. (2021). Advertising and promotion: An integrated marketing communications perspective (12th ed.). McGraw Hill.

Sharp, B. (2010). How brands grow: What marketers don't know. Oxford University Press.

Steel, J. (1998). Truth, lies, and advertising: The art of account planning. Wiley.