Using Commonalities to Build Brands Beyond Demographics
Deciding how to approach your marketing goals? Personas aren't the only route you can take. Consider commonalities, a fresh take on an aged approach to understanding audiences.
Personas used to feel like magic within marketing. Hand your team three archetypes of Kate the Millennial Mom, Jordan the Early‑Career Techie, Victor the Value Seeker and suddenly everyone could picture the customer. But years of recycling the same data points have left many marketers with cardboard cut‑outs: predictable and almost useless for team's breakthrough work.
A more powerful lens would help. Call it commonalities. It is the subtle beliefs, rituals, and frictions a group shares before it ever notices your brand. Discover those overlaps and you gain almost an insider pass to create meaning that feels natural to your audience - not just a singular archetype, but a community that can be drawn into your brand.
From Observation to Co‑Creation
Traditional ethnography asked researchers to observe, record, and interpret. This is incredibly valuable (our clients get so much benefit from this), and still we have to be sensitive that it's a one‑way street. When we treat fieldwork instead as a co‑creative exercise, participants help define the questions, curate what matters, and translate nuance we would otherwise miss. A diary study where skateboarders film their pre‑ride routines does more than capture behavior; it invites them to shape the brand’s understanding of pride, rationalization, and community etiquette.
This partnership mindset accelerates trust, and trust unlocks anecdotes that rarely surface in focus groups. For example, say an outdoor company learned that parents take photos of muddy boots lined up on porches as “proof of a weekend well lived.” That tiny commonality could reshape their fall campaign: less summit heroics, more doorway moments.
Mapping Your Own Culture Understanding First
Before diving into the consumer’s world, turn the ethnographic flashlight inward. Every company has an internal culture through language, heroes, and taboos that colors how it shows up externally. If a brand’s instinct is humor but the community values solemnity, even a brilliant insight will land flat. Understanding those internal guardrails clarifies whether you can authentically occupy a cultural space or should partner with someone who can. The last thing you want to do is to change your culture to fit an audience - that's not the goal here.
Spotting the Opportunity
Raw insights alone don’t move the market. The goal is to locate a point of convergence. This is the place where a community need meets brand capability attached to social relevance. That's the impact opportunity.
Think of impact opportunities as cultural inflection points. In sneaker culture, exclusivity once meant scarcity; today, sustainable resale carries equal status. Brands that noticed this shift early didn’t just release recycled uppers, they also built peer‑to‑peer trading platforms and loyalty tiers that reward repair. They acted where the commonality lived, not where last year’s KPI pointed.
Fieldwork Still Wins the Day
Even with AI scraping social chatter at scale, nothing replaces boots‑on‑the‑ground work. Sitting at a kitchen table, shadowing a delivery route, or reviewing diary‑study videos forces teams to feel context, not just read it. Technology can surface patterns, but people confirm meaning. Consider budgeting at least one sprint for immersive research before locking the brief. The investment could create a campaign that earns, rather than buys, attention.
Re‑tooling Personas for Richer Connection
When commonalities take center stage, personas stop being rigid profiles and become living lenses. They contain beliefs (“We celebrate visible wear on our gear”) and tensions (“We crave novelty but fear waste”) instead of income brackets and Spotify playlists. These richer perspectives travel smoothly from brand strategy into creative, product design, even customer support. And because they’re grounded in shared meaning, they're fresher than the personas that haven't been re-evaluated in years.
The Payoff for Marketing Leaders
Faster resonance: Messages built on genuine overlap cuts through algorithmic noise without needing discount bait.
Community momentum: People share stories that reflect them back to themselves; campaigns anchored in authentic commonalities can amplify through word‑of‑mouth.
Strategic clarity: Knowing where you belong in a culture is as important as knowing what you sell. It guides partnership choices, product roadmaps, and risk management.
The next time a project brief lands on your desk, resist the urge to start with segments and channels. Ask instead: What hidden common ground unites the people we hope to serve? Then go find it. Be side‑by‑side with those very people. Because when a brand speaks from shared meaning, it doesn’t just market to a community; it becomes part of one.
Getting excited and want to chat about this more? I can help.