Try describing yourself using only the elements we typically use for targeting, your age and gender, your postcode, your household makeup, maybe your income band. It is a strangely hollow exercise, and you come out of it sounding less like a person and more like a barcode – reduced to something scannable, sortable, and easy to process, but stripped of any real sense of who you are.
And yet, this is how a lot of audiences still arrive on a brief.
As an industry, we have known for a long time that values and personal motivations – not demographics – are what drive purchasing behaviour. Put simply, humans are too complex for a handful of static statistics to explain what matters to them – let alone unlock a strategy that will genuinely connect and drive commercial impact.
To be clear, this isn’t an argument against demographics. They are a useful currency that everyone understands and can easily trade in, but they aren’t designed to carry the full weight of audience understanding. At best they give us an outline; at worst they become a substitute for insight.
They are rarely the starting point of identity. They are the visible edge of something much richer linked more to family, personality, passions, place, work, values, communities. If strategy starts with the trailing indicators, we risk optimising solely for reach, while missing relevance.
Our latest Belonging in Britain research explored what people actually prioritise when they describe who they are. Age is important to 38% of people. Gender sits at 39%. But family is at 62%, personality is at 48% and passions are at 47%.
In other words, the variables most commonly used to target people are not the ones people most strongly use to understand themselves.
That shouldn’t be a surprise. Ask someone who they are and you rarely get a category. You get a story: their children, their sense of humour, their football club, their hometown, their job, their faith, their music taste, their group chat, their dog, their politics, their Saturday ritual, the thing they are trying to get better at, or the place they still call home even though they left it years ago.
Ask a media plan, and it may still answer: women, 25-44.
Demographics can tell us where a person sits in the population, but they tell us much less about what carries emotional charge in their life.
They are often trailing indicators of identity, not leading ones. By the time we have reduced someone to a demographic profile, we may already have stripped out the very things most likely to make communication feel relevant and remembered.
These missing Ps – people, passions, personality and place – are not new to audience planning, but what has changed is the pressure on brands to understand them properly.
We are in a moment where people are seeing more advertising than ever, but giving their attention more selectively. They are more sceptical of institutions, more conscious of the signals attached to the brands and media they spend time with, and more alert to what feels generic versus genuine.
Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer describes a climate of grievance towards business and institutions. At the same time, the marketing industry is racing deeper into personalisation, automation and AI-enabled targeting.
The machinery getting sharper is a great thing, but the human picture needs to keep up. Britons’ identities don’t stand still while the dashboards refresh.
Professional identity, for example, rose from 20% to 25% in a single year in our research, which is not a marginal shift. It signals how work is being reabsorbed into identity – not just employment but as status, expression, anxiety, and reinvention. Hybrid working, side hustles, economic pressure, creator culture and the public performance of career on LinkedIn have all changed how work sits inside someone’s sense of self.
A static audience profile will struggle to catch that. It will tell you what someone was classified as when the segment was built, but may not tell you what has started to matter more since.
This is the planning problem: identity now moves faster than many audience definitions. Culture changes the weight people give to different parts of themselves. A trait that felt secondary last year can become central this year because the world around it has changed.
So, the question is not whether we should throw out demographics. We should not. The question is whether our reliance on them creates blind spots in how we understand people – and that starts one layer deeper.
Which people anchor this audience’s identity? Family, partners, friends, colleagues, neighbours, teammates, creators, community leaders?
Which passions give their lives energy, status or routine?
Which personality traits do they recognise in themselves, or want others to recognise in them?
Which places shape their sense of belonging: the city, the street, the workplace, the gym, the stadium, the school gate, the venue, the online space that feels more like home than half the places they pass through physically?
These are the questions that get us closer to the emotional logic behind behaviour.
They also stop strategy collapsing into stereotypes. “Women 25-44” can invite lazy assumptions. “People whose identity is anchored in family but expressed through fitness, local pride and professional reinvention” gives a planner something more interesting to work with. It suggests tone, context, partnerships, media environments, creative tension and the role a brand might credibly play.
The job is not to make every brief longer. Nobody needs another 46-slide audience immersion deck that sits untouched in a Teams folder. The job is to ask better questions earlier, and land richer insights from the start.
Before defining the audience by what can be bought, define them by what they would recognise.
Then use demographics for what they are good at: sizing, buying, validating and checking the plan has reach. Build the strategy around the traits that carry meaning.
As modern British identities become more layered and fluid, the most commercially useful audience understanding is rarely the neatest. It is the one that makes someone pause and think: “That sounds like me.”
To explore the Key Insights from this year’s research and get your copy of the full report, click here.