Which target groups does print reach?
Socioeconomic characteristics help to distinguish magazines and make target groups plannable. Different marketers address different socio-economic segments. One of the most important questions in strategic media planning is what criteria should be used to define and address target groups.
While purely socio-demographic target group definitions based on age and gender dominated the print sector for a long time, they have gone out of fashion. Not without good reason. For example, what do King Charles III of England and Ozzy Osbourne have in common? They are both men and 73 years old. Otherwise, it can be assumed that their lifestyles, their daily routines and their consumption habits do not have too much in common.
Therefore, alternatives to a socio-demographic target group definition have been established for quite some time. Essentially, these are psychographic characteristics, such as the allocation to certain milieus (hedonists, conservatives, etc.) or a target group approach based on consumption-controlling characteristics, i. e. the query of product or brand use (“I buy brand X beer”). However, even these segmentation approaches did not always live up to their expectations, as they were not sufficiently selective or could only provide limited information on actual purchasing behavior.
In our opinion, the analysis of socio-economic segments, such as those surveyed in the most important German market media study, best for planning (b4p), has proven to be a good and meaningful alternative for many questions. A point system evaluates the three criteria of education, professional position and net household income and combines these evaluations in a point total. The point totals are then used to form seven segments of as equal size as possible and clustered from 1 = high ("top") to 7 = low ("bottom").
Regardless of this methodological classification, however, the importance of socioeconomic segments lies in the fact that lifestyles and consumption behavior of target groups cannot be understood without their social and economic background. Reason enough to take a closer look at the Ad Alliance portfolio of print titles in the Data Dive.
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In the competitive environment, the Ad Alliance range of titles has a clear positioning advantage in the higher-quality target group segments. Compared to the competitors the 28 Ad Alliance titles show a clear better positioning towards higher socio-economic segments – especially for the particularly high-reach titles.
A closer look at the user structure of the Ad Alliance titles reveals a highly qualified readership that is attractive to advertisers, with a focus on the upper segments: 41% of Ad Alliance readers are in the highest segments 1 and 2 – a top figure only surpassed by iq media, which has a portfolio geared purely to executives (Wirtschaftswoche, Die Zeit) and significantly lower reach. A glance at the top three of the seven segments even shows that an impressive 58% of Ad Alliance users are located there. In addition, only Ad Alliance managed to place three titles in the top 5 reach hits in the two highest target group segments.
Overall, Ad Alliance reaches almost 10 million readers per issue with its titles in both segments 1 and 2. And it does so with a diverse range of titles that is both broad and impressive in terms of quality – from leading women’s titles and news magazines to high-quality cooking magazines.
If you want to address high-quality, attractive target groups in the print segment, Ad Alliance’s portfolio is an important building block and a guarantee for effective target group reach and advertising impact.