Behavioural marketing in Canary Wharf

Amongst all the debate around Phorm and the like, last night witnessed the return of good old fashioned stealth marketing in the bars of Canary Wharf. As the usual groups of bankers downed Kirin whilst braying about the latest act of deleveraging in that strange kind of Euro language they use (Esperanto?), small groups of attractive young women moved seamlessly from table to table. They lingered no longer than a minute with each group before moving on. A few minutes later, those 'lucky' enough to have won favour found a free pass to Majingo's Gentlemen's Club in their pocket.

Later, I asked one of those handing out the tickets what criteria she used for selecting her guests . The answer was simple - they had to have a "twinkle in their eye". I pondered what kind of behaviours one might use to identify likely customers of alternative brands and found myself returning to the notion of the "killer question" - the one single thing that marks out their potential Sheba cat food apparanetly did it years ago by defning their audience as "those who buy their cats Xmas presents".

All of which reminded me that more often than not we dumb down our targeting strategies by looking at what audience characteristics we can readily measure, rather than what makes them unique.