Slice people up by category and you learn how they act in that category (premium in wine, budget in insurance) but nothing about how to be relevant to them more broadly: their tone of voice, their trust in brands, how they'll respond to messaging. It's a slice of a person, not a whole person.
Demographics don't fix this either — two people can grow up in the same country, same decade, same postcode, and see the world entirely differently.
The gap that's left is mindset: someone's underlying values and moral psychology, which is what predicts how to reach them.
Using this approach across Australia and New Zealand, we've identified six distinct mindset segments, and in a parallel study of 600 marketers, found that marketers representation across these segments looks nothing like their customers', a blind spot that can quietly derail our instincts about what will land.
Attendees will leave with a new lens for their next brief, that challenges how well we understand out customers:
1. A new question to bring into the brief: are we optimising for reach, or for relevance? Attendees will leave with a concrete first step: auditing their own customer base against the six mindset segments to see who they are, and who might be missing.
2. A check on your own blind spot. Marketers' mindsets don't reflect the population they're marketing to. Attendees will leave with a way to test whether their read on what customers want is real insight or projection.
3. A sharper way to pick which behavioural nudges will actually land. Values and moral psychology don't just describe an audience, they predict what moves them, giving attendees a more targeted starting point for behavioural interventions.
Attendees can complete a short 4-question Mindset survey during the session to see which of the six segments they sit in themselves.
