Understanding your audience - Canva Tutorial

- [Instructor] The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said, "If a lion could speak, we could not understand him." If your frames of reference are so far removed, self-centered, and complicated, you can be the smartest person in the room, but you still won't be able to find common ground with your audience. Storytelling is about finding common ground. In this lesson, I want to show you why a clear understanding of your audience's background is critical to truly connecting and telling a story that resonates with them. When I'm in the initial stages of my audience research process, I usually start with the audience background. This splits into two, the demographic side and the psychographic one. Demographics are your usual suspects that I'm sure you've stumbled upon in your career. Age, location, language, marital status, spending power, etcetera. Now psychographics is where things can get turned upside down. Here's why. You might have seen this image making the rounds on the web. If you look at those two individuals, even though their demographics are identical, I'm sure their attitudes, values, and beliefs would differ significantly. In storytelling and life in general, using only demographic data to understand an audience is a recipe for disaster. To fully understand your audience and why they act the way they do, you must understand their psychology. To do that, let's dig a little bit deeper into the psychographic attributes. An attitude is your immediate disposition towards a concept or an object. Attitudes typically change pretty frequently and without too much resistance. For example, a person might love Italian cuisine and be prejudiced towards Chinese food. But given an opportunity to try the new cuisine, they might change how they perceive it. Hence, changing their attitude. Beliefs, on the other hand, can be much stronger. They develop from past experiences and may not necessarily be based on facts or logic, but emotion or particular sentiments. More importantly, beliefs often serve as a frame of reference through which we attempt to interpret the world. Changing a belief might take much longer and require solid evidence to persuade an individual of something they did not believe in previously. Last but not least, values are core concepts and foundational ideas that guide a person with regard to ethical behavior and decision making. They're the purest reflection of our psyche. Values are even more challenging to change than beliefs. And for that to happen, a person may need to undergo a transformative life experience. I hope you can now see why the best way to understand an audience is to use both demographic and psychographic data. In that way, we get to see a multitude of dimensions and truly get to know an audience.