Audience behaviours are changing fast. The millennials which will make up the majority of your customers according to one analysis from Standard & Poor’s are looking for markedly different things from organisations than the generations that have gone before. How authentically we communicate who we are and our purpose is becoming a significant differentiator.

Digital is now everywhere and is almost everything. New social networks come and go, content is the fuel and only the really great stuff that adds real value gets noticed, let alone shared en masse to achieve the network effect.

Technology has promised us the data to get closer to really understanding who our customer is.It is the bringing of the customer into the heart of the business that allows us to better orchestrate our talent and align our brand, products and services to their needs and motivations. We don’t simply want to recognise who they are but ultimately drive out effective engagement with them; this is what brings business gain. Valuable exchange requires not only a clear understanding of who they are and how they behave now, but also how they are likely too into the future.

Working with the benchmarking set up in the understand phase of our process, our work to profile the audience is used in aligning our activities, and ratifying our assumptions through the lense of the customer. In doing so we set up the processes and activities to ensure that the customer is alive, real, and at the heart of our future business.