How US Business Can Save More Than $190 Billion Each Year

US Business Can Save 190 billions

Everything in business begins with a target audience description, and new research proves they are shockingly flawed, to the tune over more than $190 billion in 2019 alone.

Everyone in business can relate to this: sitting in a meeting room talking about who the target audience is for a new product or service or internal initiative. It’s essential to understand who we are doing things for, or the money we spend will be wasted on people we don’t really need to reach. But new research proves that despite our best efforts we are wasting as much as 90% of our budgets, no matter how hard we try to get it right.

“The single biggest waste of time and money in any organization is demographic target audience profiles,” says David Allison, who has amassed a half-million surveys from around the world that measure what people really care about; what they value.

Allison’s database is so large and accurate it could earn a Ph.D. several times over. It maps 420 different things that people value, want, need and expect from life. If, for example, responses from millennials are compared, they only agree 15% of the time. “With all the noise about how millennials all want things to be a certain way, it’s shocking to find that they agree so little. 15% agreement means they disagree 85% of the time. You are wasting 85% of your money targeting them.” It’s not just the millennials. Generation Z only agrees 16%, Generation X scores 11%, and Baby Boomers only agree 13% of the time.

“Looking at all the demographic labels we can’t find a single one: age, gender, education, income, marital status, where people share much in common except the label itself, Allison concludes.  “Demographics are a broken and outdated way to profile the audiences we are trying to reach.”

In 2019, the combined spending on advertising in the USA alone will exceed 240 billion. If those budgets are inaccurately targeted between 80% and 90% of the time, that’s a waste of somewhere between $192 to $216 billion.

“Of course, those figures don’t include public relations, or human resources, or research & development, or design, or any other business function that relies on targeting an audience. We’re talking trillions of dollars a year in North America alone...add the rest of the world and the numbers are truly mind-boggling.”

“Think of what we could improve if we didn’t waste all that money.” Allison says. His database could provide an answer. “Any sociology student can tell you what we value determines what we do. We’ve built this database to profile target audiences based on shared values, and the results are incredible.” When shared-values, or what Allison calls Valuegraphics are used to profile a target audience, they agree on all the 420 metrics in the study as much as 89% of the time.

“That’s 8 or 9 times better, which means we could use those trillions of wasted dollars to do such remarkable things. Saving the planet comes to mind,”  he says without missing a beat.”