Who's In Your Audience?

Earlier this year, I attended a seminar in Branding & Communications Today. 

It was a morning of examining brand strategies and key demographics. The phrase of the day was definitely 'Gen Y', after a presentation focused purely on exploring the behaviours (on and offline) of the social media generation (those born '81 to '01) who were also affectionately referred to as Young Fogey's, for their tendancies to behave older than their years, despite their depictions in the media).

At the end of the morning, we broke into groups and discussed the morning's presentations. When the topic of Gen Y inevitably came up, one of the members in our group posed an interesting question:

Do you consider your audience based on age/gender/routine or do you consider your audience in terms of their lifestyle and behaviour?

An example he gave of this was a 40 year old divorcee regressing into juvenile behaviour compared against an 'Young Fogey' behaving wise beyond his (or her) year's.

While the process of considering demographics is clearly not as clean cut as A or B, it's still an interesting thought, don't you think?