The inaugural 1st Wednesday of 2015 was presented by Clair Gilchrist, Culture Republic Associate Director of Research, alongside Graham Wilson, Client Director for Consumer Insight & Targeting at Experian, focusing on the new iteration of Mosaic Scotland.

Available exclusively to Culture Republic’s partner network, the session was designed to provide marketers with the information they need to make best use of the new Mosaic Scotland in their own work, highlighting the resources available on Experian’s Segmentation Portal and how to understand and use this information.

If you want to understand your audience, you need to understand the population that your audience is drawn from. The lifestyles; levels of affluence; typical household composition; employment status, age and gender of the individuals in your catchment area will all play a part in determining who your current or potential audience could be – and by understanding the context that you’re working within, you can design your programming and activity to meet and match the needs of specific population groups around you. Mosaic can provide this information and more.

The development of the new Mosaic classifications reflects recent behavioural and demographic shifts within the population – for instance, an increase in private rental, and a trend towards more active retirement within the older population. Clair explained how the depth of behavioural information available within the new Mosaic is significantly greater than before, with particular focus on communications channel preferences, use of technology and websites visited.

To demonstrate the power of Mosaic in action, Experian’s Graham Wilson talked through a real-life example of how one organisation has used Mosaic Scotland to plan for audience acquisition, determining which segments of the market were most receptive to certain messages and using this information to effectively place and target relevant communications.

Nick Parr from Edinburgh’s Festival and King’s Theatres talked to us about how he used Mosaic to grow the audience for pantomime (oh yes he did!) Looking at historic panto attender data, the King’s Theatre was able to identify which Mosaic Groups and Types were most in the market for a new production of Aladdin. This information was used to create the Theatre’s first campaign  using Sky Adsmart, a means of demographically targeting adverts to the people you want to see them, rather than relying on segmentation by programme or viewing time.

The new Mosaic has proved to be a popular subject amongst Culture Republic’s partners, with the February session in Glasgow and the upcoming March session in Edinburgh both sold out. If you haven’t been able to make it to one of our sessions, or if you’d like a tailored tutorial for your team, then please get in touch – we’d love to help you.