If you know your customers’ postcodes, you’re just a short step away from unlocking a wealth of data that can help you understand their characteristics, lifestyles and behaviours. The great news for marketers is that the quality and accuracy of this information has just taken a big leap forward, with the launch of Mosaic Scotland’s new improved classification system for every household in the country.

Mosaic Scotland provides the postcode-based profiling information that we use at Culture Republic to analyse and report on regional populations and arts attendance. If you’re accustomed to receiving reports from us, terms such as ‘Upper Echelons’, ‘Families on the Move’, ‘Urban Sophisticates’ and ‘Renters Now Owning’ will probably be familiar to you.

These are all umbrella ‘groups’ of households, and every group is further broken down into ‘types’, each having a detailed set of descriptors associated with it, identifying dominant characteristics, family units, hobbies, online behaviours and even typical names that can help you visualise your customers as individuals and communicate with them in a way that respects their needs and preferences.  Armed with this information, you can:

• Identify the predominant ‘groups’ and ‘types’ that make up your audience;
• Look for ‘more of the same’: see where people of the same groups and types are living within your local area;
• Understand the extent of your current reach;
• Identify ‘missing’ segments of your local audience: who lives in your local area but doesn’t attend?

This information is now more detailed than ever before, and has been created using over 150 variables and 850m pieces of information. Where the national population was split up into 10 groups and, within those groups, 44 different types under the ‘old’ classification system, it has now been reclassified to create 14 groups, further divided into 57 types. The new grouping responds to changes in popular behaviours and household profiles, including:

• The boomerang generation: young adults staying in the parental nest for longer, which has an impact on the spending power within the household;
• A significant increase in private renting driven by lifestyle choice and cost of living, which has impact on locations in which individuals are choosing to live;
• A rise in individuals living alone right across the affluence spectrum placing very different demands on brands;
• A new baby boom being driven in part by professionals in their thirties entering parenthood at a later stage in life than previous generations;
• A change in the lifestyles of retired people, driving an increase in demand for access to leisure and entertainment in less traditional retirement locations;
• ‘Rurban migration’ – those choosing to live in rural locations without giving up the comforts of an urban lifestyle.

Mosaic’s new, more detailed classifications can enable you to create more accurate profiles of your audience than ever before. It also means that making like-for-like audience comparisons with past reporting periods may appear more challenging.  The new depth of information means that every one of the familiar ‘old’ groups and types has been broken down and dispersed, scattering the component individuals right across the new classification system.

In some cases, there is a clear migration from old groups to new – for instance, 70% of the former group E, Urban Sophisticates, are found in the new group N, Rental Hubs; 59% of J, Shades of Grey, are now in the new group L Vintage Value; 84% of D, Country Lifestyles, are quite evenly split across the new groups C, Country Living and D, Rural Reality. In other cases such as the old groups C, Small Town Propriety, G, Renters now Owning and H, Low Income Families, parallels are less clear as individuals have been spread out quite evenly across multiple groups. The same is true as we work through the system to focus in more detail on ‘types’.

So where is your audience now? For arts and cultural organisations accustomed to using Mosaic information to inform targeting decisions, there’s a need to realign your terms of reference with the new, more accurate classification system. If you would like to discuss the impact and potential of the new Mosaic classification system for your own marketing communications or audience profiling, please get in touch.

Main image credit: Etsy Avatar Mosaic by Jared Tarbell via a Creative Commons license