The world modelA composite, not a person
Ingrid
67Bergen
Retired teacher
The most attentive reader in the set, on the only platform she uses, and the least forgiving of a missing price.
At a glance
Online
- After breakfast
- Sunday evening
Where
- Facebook because the hiking group plans every trip there, and she clicks all of it.
In the field
Reads, never postsMornings
The day
Ingrid opens Facebook after breakfast and goes through it properly. She does not skim. She reads the comments, she follows the link, and if the page she lands on does not say what something costs she leaves and remembers the name.
She is the treasurer of a hiking group of sixty people, which means her recommendation moves more money than her own spending does. She organises on one platform and would not describe herself as a social media user at all.
Field notes
What is observable about this kind of audience, and the published work that describes it.
01A single platform, fully inhabited
Single-platform audiences are not partial audiences. Multi-channel strategy assumes ubiquity, and that assumption fails for a large, older and comparatively wealthy segment that is entirely reachable in one place.
02Clarity is evaluated as candour
An undisclosed price is not read as a prompt to enquire. It is read as evasion, and it transfers to the brand as a durable judgement rather than a momentary friction.
03Organisers decide for others
She chooses on behalf of sixty people. Influence of this kind is structural rather than numerical: it comes from holding a coordinating role, which is precisely the position opinion leadership describes (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955; Rogers, 2003).
Who sits nearby
Nearness in the field is behavioural, not geographic. The unnamed individuals around a reference persona are people whose observable behaviour resembles theirs.
References
- Katz, E. and Lazarsfeld, P. F. (1955). Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications. Free Press.
- Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations. 5th ed. Free Press.