Your Brand Voice Is Not Always The Right Voice

If your visitor marketing plan is built on postcodes and age brackets, you’re not really doing marketing - you’re doing census reporting.

That’s not to say demographics are useless. They’re a decent starting point. But if your goal is to influence visitor behaviour - to drive more visits, increase memberships, spark word-of-mouth, and build lasting loyalty - then you need to go deeper. You need to move beyond what people are, and start paying attention to how they think and act.

Because, chances are,  a 35-year-old mum in Luton will probably have nothing in common with a 35-year-old mum in Plymouth - except maybe a few traits. And if they don’t even have that, your age-band ad isn’t going to shift the needle.

This is where psychographics come in. And why behaviour - not demographics - should be at the heart of your attraction’s marketing.

The Comfort of Demographics

Demographics are easy to collect and easy to explain. You can segment your database into neat little piles: ages 25–44, families within 30 miles, income band C2, D, E. It looks great on a slide deck. It’s measurable, trackable, and familiar.

But it’s not actionable.

Knowing someone is a parent doesn’t tell you how they plan their weekends. Knowing they live locally doesn’t mean they’re interested. Knowing their income bracket doesn’t reveal how they make decisions, or what kind of messaging they’ll respond to.

More importantly, demographics don’t explain why someone books, visits, upgrades, or tells a friend.

Because behaviour - especially in leisure and culture - is emotional, situational, and often irrational. These people are strangers, you don’t know them - yet.

You don’t visit a museum just because you’re a 42-year-old in a market town. No one wakes up and says, “Ah yes, as a mid-income man in postcode sector YO24, today is my statistically likely day to engage with cultural heritage.” That’s not how decisions happen. You visit because it aligns with your current mindset - not your data profile.

Maybe you’re the sort of person who values curiosity and discovery. You read long-form articles to the end. You’ve clicked “save for later” on at least four exhibitions in the past month, even though you didn’t buy tickets. You tend to scroll event listings late at night, and you’re more likely to act when something feels exclusive or time-limited - but only if it doesn’t require a rigid schedule. Your past visits suggest you prefer modern art over historical artefacts, café over gift shop, and tend to spend longer in one space rather than jumping between galleries.

You ignore most marketing emails, unless they’re short, visually clean, and have a clear “what’s in it for me” message. You’re not price-sensitive, but you do need to feel like something is worth your time. You’ve never joined as a member, but you always choose the ‘support us’ donation option at checkout, which suggests you’re values-driven but noncommittal.

That’s psychographic gold.

Not just who you are - but how you act, how you decide, how you weigh risk, pleasure, effort, and reward. And when a campaign lands in your feed on a Thursday night with “A new after-hours exhibition. No crowds. Free drink. Quiet space. This Friday only.” - it works, not because of the timing, but because it mirrors the kind of person you are.

This is how effective campaigns happen: not through lucky guesses, but through the steady layering of behavioural data, psychographic insight, and message-matching. It's marketing that understands your values (solitude, exclusivity, efficiency), your habits (late-night scrolling, hesitant commitment), and your decision-making style (experiential, not transactional).

It’s not about hitting a demographic. It’s about hitting a nerve.

A Small Glimpse Into a Bigger Picture

To start thinking psychographically, you need a base framework. One way to start is to use personas - distilled profiles based on observed behaviours, motivations, and decision-making patterns.

Here’s a very small sample from a much larger table (can’t give all my secrets away) I used to use when mapping mindsets. These aren’t “types of people,” they’re modes of behaviour. Modes that can shift, overlap, and evolve:

This is just the tip of the iceberg.

In a full matrix, it covers hundreds of variables- from channel preferences (email vs. WhatsApp vs. social) to emotional triggers (certainty, novelty, belonging) to behavioural frictions (low digital literacy, parental overwhelm, decision fatigue). And even then, it’s not about locking someone into a box. It's about recognising tendencies.

Because here’s the thing: categorisation only gets you so far.

People aren’t static. They don’t behave the same way in every context. Someone might be a Spontaneous Explorer when booking solo, but a Planner Parent when bringing their kids. Someone might be a Value Hunter during the cost-of-living crunch, but an Experience Collector when splurging for a birthday weekend.

That’s why fixed segmentation has limits.

Too many systems - CRMs, mailing lists, campaign tools - treat people as one label forever. “Newsletter Subscriber.” “Family Ticket Purchaser.” “Local Visitor Aged 35–44.” But people don’t behave like rows in a database. They shift constantly based on circumstance, mood, motivation, and even weather. You don’t want to market a couples package to someone who just became single last week.

This is why modern, effective marketing needs to be live and adaptive.

It means listening to real-time signals - booking patterns, browsing habits, engagement levels - and responding with context-aware messaging. It means using tools that personalise how you talk to someone based on their current behaviour, not just past labels. And it means giving your team the permission to move beyond the spreadsheet and build for the messy, emotional, real-life humans on the other side.

In short: personas are a helpful lens and they can really help you get started in psychographic thinking. But if you’re still using them as a cage, you’re missing the point.

And This Is Why Your Marketing Team Structure Might Be Holding You Back

Live, adaptive marketing sounds exciting - but it also demands a completely different way of working. And for many attractions, the biggest barrier isn’t the tech. It’s the process.

The traditional marketing team structure, with its layers of approvals, rigid sign-off procedures, and insistence on centralised tone-of-voice policing, (or in smaller attractions just a single person in charge of it all) just isn’t built for speed. When behaviour shifts by the hour - driven by weather, transport strikes, or a TikTok trend - waiting 24 hours for the ‘Head of Marketing’ to approve a caption is dead weight.

This kind of behaviour-driven marketing doesn’t thrive in a world of tidy campaign calendars and quarterly reviews. It needs trust. It needs autonomy. It needs marketers who are close to the data, close to the tools, and empowered to act in the moment - even if the copy isn’t brand-perfect, even if the graphic doesn’t get routed through six versions.

And that’s uncomfortable for a lot of organisations.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth: your brand voice is not always the right voice. Especially if it wasn’t written for the person you’re trying to reach, in the moment you’re trying to reach them.

Sometimes the right message sounds more casual, more direct, more human than your guidelines would allow. And that’s okay - because if it moves someone to act, to visit, to share, then it’s working.

Being precious about tone while being sluggish on response is a recipe for missed opportunities. In behavioural marketing, time matters. Relevance fades. Context changes. The right message delivered an hour too late might as well have never been sent.

So if you want to market to how people actually behave, you need to let go of how your team used to behave. ‘Agile’ beats perfect (I hate that word but it’s true). Responsive beats polished. And authenticity beats approval chains every time.

From Awareness to Impact

Many attractions, especially charitable ones, still think in terms of “raising awareness.” But awareness is not the same as intent. And it’s certainly not the same as action.

You don’t need your audience to know more about you - you need them to act differently because of you.

That shift requires smarter targeting, smarter messaging, and smarter thinking. It requires you to stop asking, “Who are they?” and start asking, “What do they do, and why?”

Because in a world full of noise, the brands that win are the ones that understand what moves people.

Know Their Behaviour - Not Just Their Bio

It’s easy to get comfortable with demographic data. It’s neat. It feels solid. But if you want to build campaigns that actually change behaviour - that drive visits, memberships, and advocacy - you need to think psychographically.

Understand your visitors’ motivations. Speak to their decision styles. Build for their real-world behaviours.

And most importantly, accept that your audience isn’t fixed. They evolve. So your marketing should too.

Because until you move past the postcode, you’ll never really know your visitor.

Just a note:

I’ll probably come back to this topic again - it’s one of my passions and, frankly, one of the things I’ve been doing the longest. Understanding behaviour, influencing decisions, and building systems that respond to people in real time isn’t just interesting to me - it’s the work I love. And there’s a lot more to say.