Segmentation is the cornerstone of modern marketing. We know the age, the location, the browsing habits and often, in our case anyway, the propensity to donate. Increasingly, we can even predict what someone might do next.

Every day, another AI-powered segmentation or targeting tool appears in our LinkedIn feeds promising to turn all that data into better revenue, engagement or fundraising. And, to be fair, it sometimes can.

If your existing targeting is a blunt instrument, giving it some considerably sharper edges will probably improve things. Better data can help you find the right people, at the right time, with a message that's more likely to land. But there’s a limit to how far segmentation can take you. Because knowing who someone is doesn't necessarily tell you why they will care. That, instead, requires something rather harder to put into a database: meaning.

The most successful campaigns often find a cultural idea that people recognise instinctively, then give them a way to participate in it. Now, in social, these ideas manifest as memes that ‘offload cognitive burden’, which people participate in by sharing and viralising. Put another way, these are memes which make people feel seen and understood without having to over-explain. Sometimes these ideas, whether social or not, cut clean across the neat demographic boundaries we’ve spent years constructing.

But strip away the jargon and there's something much simpler going on. It's finding something that matters to lots of different people for different reasons. Here are three examples that show what happens when brands stop talking to generations and start talking to people.

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1. Cadbury: Donate Your Words

Older people, loneliness and a chocolate brand. On paper, these things don't make such an especially obvious combination.

But in 2019, Cadbury partnered with Age UK on Donate Your Words, a campaign tackling loneliness among older people. Rather brilliantly, the campaign didn't simply tell younger people that loneliness was a problem affecting older people. It asked them to imagine what loneliness might actually feel like – and then do something about it.

Cadbury removed the words from the front of its iconic Dairy Milk bars, donating 30p to Age UK from each bar sold. The campaign encouraged people to donate their own words too, by pledging to spend time talking to an older person. The campaign wasn't really asking people to care about older people, it was asking them to care about connection. And connection is an idea with considerably wider reach.

A younger person could see a grandparent in the story, a parent could think about their own future, someone who had experienced bereavement could recognise the loneliness of losing people around them. Someone else might simply (and rightly) think: I should call Mum.

The campaign reportedly inspired more than 460,000 people to pledge a small act of kindness, while raising more than £300,000 for Age UK. Cadbury subsequently returned to the partnership, extending the idea into further campaigns celebrating the stories and experiences of older people.

It's a useful lesson in intergenerational marketing because nobody had to be told which generation they belonged to, they simply had to recognise a human feeling.

The lesson: Don't ask how to make an issue relevant to every generation. Find the human truth that makes the issue relevant in the first place.

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2. RSPB: The Unloved Birds Club

Somewhere along the way, fundraising got very good at explaining why people should care. It was always less good, perhaps, at giving them a reason to have a little fun.

The RSPB's Unloved Birds Club took a very different route.

It began life as a social format built around an irresistible premise: what about the poor birds nobody puts on a calendar? Not the majestic eagle or impossibly photogenic puffin but the awkward, odd ones. The birds that, frankly, have been dealt a difficult hand in the looks department.

It was funny, distinctive, eminently shareable and, crucially, it didn't feel like fundraising. The idea created a new cultural territory around conservation: affection for the underdog. You didn't need to be an experienced birder, know your chiffchaff from your willow warbler or have strong feelings about habitat restoration. You just needed to find an ugly bird oddly charming.

The audience could come in through humour, curiosity, anthropomorphism or simply the pleasure of discovering something overlooked. Then something interesting happened: the social idea had enough energy to become something much bigger: The Unloved Birds Club, a monthly giving proposition. Members receive a monthly ‘Bird Briefing’, meet a different club star and get the ‘silly stuff’ alongside the conservation story their donations support. It’s now a £5-a-month proposition built around those overlooked species. That's pretty much a reversal of the usual fundraising model. Rather than starting with a donation proposition and finding some content to promote it, the relationship began with a piece of culture people wanted to spend time with. The fundraising proposition came later.

That makes the idea particularly interesting for intergenerational marketing. Humour doesn't belong to one demographic, neither does curiosity nor a fondness for an underdog. The RSPB didn't need separate creative for every generation; it found a cultural behaviour that travelled.

The lesson: Sometimes the best route to a broader audience isn't to make your proposition more universally worthy, it's to make it more culturally interesting.

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3. parkrun: the campaign that isn't a campaign

Our third example isn't really a marketing campaign at all. parkrun has built a proposition that spans generations without appearing to have been designed around the concept of intergenerational appeal. You can run it, walk it, volunteer, bring the kids, bring the dog or just rock up and cheer someone else on.

The genius is in the lack of pressure; there’s no qualifying standard to hit, no particular tribe to join, no requirement to buy the right kit or demonstrate the right level of fitness. You just show up and participate in whatever way works for you – and that makes ’showing up’ the behaviour at the heart of the brand.

A competitive runner can care about their time, someone recovering their fitness can take an hour to walk the course, a parent can bring a child and a grandparent can spectate. Different motivations hook into the same ritual, which is the bit marketers should pay attention to. We tend to think that a broad audience requires a broad message. parkrun demonstrates another possibility: a simple behaviour can accommodate a remarkably broad range of motivations.

Perhaps its non-commercial origins are part of the reason – there’s no countdown clock urging you to convert and no ‘last chance’ offer. No minimum spend, even. The proposition doesn't need to manufacture urgency because participation itself creates the value.

Over the past two decades, millions of people have taken part in parkrun events around the world. The organisation has become a fixture in communities precisely because it gives people something to do together without requiring them to be the same kind of person. That's a pretty useful model for organisations trying to build long-term engagement.

The lesson: Don't over-engineer the audience experience. Sometimes the most inclusive proposition is one that lets people decide for themselves what participation means.

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So, what does this tell us? None of these examples is anti-segmentation. Good data, targeting and audience insight remain essential. If you don't understand who you're talking to, you're making life unnecessarily difficult for yourself. But segmentation should be the beginning of the thinking, not the end of it.

The danger is that increasingly sophisticated targeting can make us believe that increasingly precise messages will automatically produce better marketing. They won't. A perfectly targeted message can still be completely forgettable. The more interesting opportunity is to use audience data to understand the different ways people might enter a cultural idea – then create something powerful enough to give those different people a reason to enter through the same door.

Cadbury found connection. The RSPB found the joy of the underdog. parkrun found the simple pleasure of showing up. None of these ideas needed people to share an age, a lifestyle or a demographic profile. They needed people to recognise something in themselves. And that's perhaps the most useful lesson for intergenerational marketing.

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Images: Unsplash, iStock/Getty Images

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