The power of audience-led approaches and data-driven insights

With the increasing competition in most industries, businesses need to differentiate themselves by understanding their customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. Moreover, as the world becomes more data-driven, it is essential for businesses to leverage data to make informed decisions and validate their hypotheses. Incorporating qualitative elements of research to gain deeper insights into the attitudes and behaviors of the audience must be encouraged. Businesses can deliver more value to their customers by taking a holistic and data-driven approach.

Dipti Kachru, Global Chief Marketing Officer, discusses the power of taking an audience-led approach in marketing. She highlights the importance of psychographic and behavioral research, which helps to unlock insights and shape go-to-market strategies. She also emphasizes the value of data-led approaches to validate hypotheses and discover propensity. Lastly, Dipti goes on to explain how these insights can be extended to content creation, product design, and client experience to offer added and differentiated value to clients.

1. How has focusing on a specific audience segment shaped your ability to engage with your customers?

Dipti Kachru: As marketers, we all have been taught early on that you need to start with the client in the center, and my journey has been no different. But the time I really started to see the power of taking an audience led approach was in my role at JPMorgan Chase, where I was leading marketing for the affluent segment.

In this mission, we had a lot of our customers (Read more...) had a checking account without a credit card with us. This was a very transactional relationship. But the affluent clients, we noticed, had most of their money outside. So, we thought about ways of engaging them and building products and solutions that will give them the confidence to bring their money back to Chase in terms of a primary banking and investing relationship.

And in doing so, we took a very audience specific lens. We took a deep dive into what the affluent looks like way beyond just the demographics of how much money they made, or how much they had in their bank accounts. We wanted to understand their relationship with money, their aspirations, what kept them up at night, both from a psychographic and behavioral perspective. This helped us unlock a few insights that then shaped not just our go to market, but also helped us start to build product features and client experiences that delivered on those unmet needs. It was a great growth story for the business.

2. What did a psychographic behavioral lens add, compared to just a purely demographic segmentation?

Dipti Kachru: We’re in the business of winning hearts and minds. Demographic data does sort of give you a good foundation of understanding of who you’re talking to and who you’re interacting with. But the psychographic side is where the experience of the customer starts to come through their attitudes.

If you look at me as a 40-something-year old Gen X woman in the tri-state area, I would say I am not part of a homogeneous orientation or a homogeneous group. When you start to layer on the psychographic side of the story, is when you start to really understand what my drivers of choice might be compared to someone else’s. Similarly, once you start to follow behavioral patterns, it starts to sort of point you towards what intent might look like, what propensity to purchase is, or what some of the highly perceived benefits are, for me as a buyer. That’s the value of a psychographic and behavioral research.

3. How does that allow you to take a data led approach rather than relying on intuition, which I know can be the instinct sometimes as a marketer?

Dipti Kachru: That’s how I look at it. Every single point of data that we can get our hands on as a marketer, or as a business leader, I think is critical in helping shape the right holistic solution set and experience, especially in this experience economy. Data for me is about validation of what might be an intuitive hypothesis, or it could be a hypothesis led through data and discovery. Data also helps you understand intent in a much more granular fashion. The magic of data becomes in discovering propensity, where you can go find others who look like a particular design target that you’ve identified for yourself.

4. Why is it also important to include qualitative elements of research?

Dipti Kachru: There are two sides of the coin. Data helps validate. The qualitative side is where you start to peel back the layers of the audience, for factors that numbers and data do not often show you. It helps you uncover what’s often unsaid. I’ve spent a lot of time in focus groups and ethnographic studies. In fact, in some of my work over the years, I was over indexed on showing up to these focus groups and ethnographic studies because that’s when you start to hear what people feel and how they interact. In these rooms, body language reaction emotions, then connects back to how you validate that data. I think they’re a very happy club.

5. How can you then extend those insights, firstly, to content creation, and beyond that to include areas like product design or client experience?

Dipti Kachru: The way I think about it is starting with the customer with a very defined segment and segment needs. It is not just a marketing exercise because it is not just about marketing or value proposition or content. It is about how you deliver value to the customer. It must be holistic, and it must start with how a product is designed to how the experience comes to be, what the sales cycle looks like, and how the purchase behavior gets built into the go to market. Then of course comes how the customer service angle is built and designed around that customer’s needs. It must be across the customer journey and absolutely holistic.

6. How do all of these lessons translate to Broadridge’s work? How can you offer added and differentiated value to the client experiences?

Dipti Kachru: It really comes down to how you action all this insight. Most people know Broadridge as a global FinTech leader that delivers critical communications and technology solutions for capital markets and in the financial services space across wealth and asset management. What a lot of folks don’t know is the work we do in communications. We deliver about 9 billion pieces of communication, across regulatory communications, proxy, essential communications, and marketing communications on behalf of our clients.

And when you think about every single one of those touch points, whether it’s print or digital, it’s an opportunity for a brand to make a difference. A lot of the work we do revolves around helping our clients improve those customer communications to be able to bring more value to the customer. I’ll give you an example. We did something recently with a company called Sutera, which is a wealth manager. We helped look at all the communication touch points that they were sending to clients and consolidate that into one intuitive holistic experience. You wouldn’t get multiple emails and multiple printed pieces. It was one consolidated communication that told you what you really needed to know and simplified the journey for you. We call it belt and focus. Ideas like that are deeply driven by research. We do a lot of investor research. We understand behavioral patterns and how people are engaging with communication in an omni channel way. Then we help our clients think about how to make every touchpoint better.

7. What were some of the biggest lessons that spun out of that experience of delivering that service in the way that you did?

Dipti Kachru: There are two parts to the story.

The first part of the story is, are you going deep enough in the data and understanding preference behaviors needs? The second part of the story is how do you deliver that through? Because it is technical. It is about where your data lives. It is about where technology lives. How you deliver personalized experiences, both digital and analog. A large part of that learning for us was not just to know what clients and customers want, but a data strategy that leads to that and a technology solution that helps deliver it seamlessly and efficiently and bringing that entire narrative together holistically.

8. Why do you think having a deep understanding of your customers is going to be more important in 2023 than ever before?

Dipti Kachru: Think of us as consumers. In the economy today, our choices of brand and preference are driven by how it was served, how personalized it feels, how relevant it is and how it connects to our values. It is no different from thinking about customers at large, whether it’s financial services or otherwise. I think for brands to be relevant, especially as marketers will be pulling back given market volatility and cost pressures, being able to deeply understand your customers and deliver very relevant data checkpoints that reflects the understanding, and the shared value becomes more and more important. But it is the way I think you drive differentiation. A lot of our data is showing us that that is what is driving choice. Customers are now willing to pay a premium for an experience that is more aligned with their expectations.

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Dipti Kachru joined Broadridge as the global CMO in January 2022. As a member of Broadridge’s executive leadership team, she leads all aspects of global marketing, including brand, advertising, digital marketing, content strategy, lead generation and events. Dipti is an experienced marketing leader with a proven record of building industry-leading brands and driving business growth. She joins Broadridge from JPMorgan Chase, where she recently served as CMO for Wealth Management. Dipti also held several senior consumer and wholesale marketing roles at J.P. Morgan and OppenheimerFunds, Inc.