A recipe for success: Finding the right audience for the recipe box market

This is true for one in particular, Gousto, who recently announced a massive campaign to improve awareness of its products and identify potential customers, particularly busy families who are keen on eating healthy.

The end goal? Serving 400 million home-cooked meals in the UK by 2025, leaving them as one of top recipe box brands in the country. But what is the most effective way to go about this?

Social clustering

This is a perfect opportunity to understand the potential of social data, or more precisely, Starcount’s unique method of analysing social data, known as ‘social clustering’ – analysing the passions and likes of social media users and clustering them together into different segments based on similar passions (this method is different to, and much more effective than ‘social listening – if you would like to understand more about the differences and why social clustering works better, read this).

Unlike other data sets, social data (when used in social clustering) can provide a much clearer image of who a particular customer is, what they are passionate about and what motivates them in life. It allows you to understand who your customer is and, more importantly, what they will be looking for in your brand.

Passions to postcodes

What is crucial for Gousto is identifying families that are healthy eaters and are too busy to go out and buy their own ingredients. This is where Starcount’s latest platform, Audiences, comes in.

By overlaying a customer’s passions onto postcodes, with geo-demographic data, Audiences can effectively build this segment and locate them.

Firstly, we would use social clustering to develop the ‘healthy eating’ audience, clustering social media users together who share passions such as healthy eating and cooking. From here, we can use open source and third party geo-demographic data to identify people within those clusters who are most likely to have children.

Using the same data, we can then identify their careers and assess whether they are most likely to fall into the category of a busy parent. Finally, we can pinpoint, to a postcode level, where identified families within this audience live and, using that information, model out where other similar families also live.

With very little effort, we have created an entire audience that is perfect for Gousto to target. But it doesn’t end there.

Personalising the experience

Using the passion data, we can then work out how best to communicate Gousto’s message to them, personalising the entire experience, from marketing to retention, based on their passions. For example, if one of those families is also passionate about travel, we can use that insight to make sure that this is reflected in both the tone and style of any communication, and in future product development, creating new recipes that speak to the passions of that particular customer.

Going one step further, we can use the platform to identify other brands that resonate best with the audience and would therefore present good opportunities for partnerships, or even identify influencers who resonate well with the audience and could therefore genuinely represent the brand.

Audiences has transformed our understanding of how we look at both social data and geo-demographic data, pooling them together in a unique way, overlaying ‘passions’ onto postcodes. For recipe box brands like Gousto, as well as companies in industries across the board, it will prove revolutionary to expanding their audience and their share of the market.