At TRA, I coined the term Heavy Swing Purchasers, meaning category heavies who buy your brand occasionally, as we observed this to be the most sales-responsive group for most mature CPG brands studied. However, I've always believed in principle that advertising ought to be directed to those people who are most likely to begin/increase their usage of your brand as a result of ad exposure -- where you can make the most difference. In CPG, this turned out to result in the selection of almost the same media vehicles as Heavy Swing Purchasers.
Being able to fine-tune targeting to this degree appears to be widely available today in digital. However, most advanced targets being sold and bought today in digital and in television are not based on direct match (deterministic) a la TRA, but on fusion (probabilistic). TRA compared direct match car ownership data with Zip code-level fusion car ownership data and found that only a handful of very expensive cars had a strong enough relationship with Zip+4 for the fusion to be more than random.
These fusions by demographics and geographics, according to results revealed by Simmons Research at the ARF Annual Conference, on average explain only 5% of the variance in predicting brand usage across thousands of brands (including media) in all verticals. More recently however, Simmons developed an innovative new approach -- called Predictive Consumer Insights -- in which they use psychographic statements and RMT DriverTagsTM to triple the predictive power to 15% on average.
It's not the demographics that cause the use of the specific brand -- the demographics are a blunt tool for predicting brand choice, when compared to characteristics that are more psychological in nature.
Predictive Consumer Insights also reveal what makes a brand special to its consumers, based on what motivations predict usage. This understanding looked at in a competitive context can be very clarifying to the process of developing new creative executions.
If you'd like to watch a replay of the Simmons webinar or download the slides, it is available by visiting