Skip to content

Using Emotional Drivers & Personas to Stimulate Acquisition, Retention and Share of Wallet 

Our client, one of the largest communication technology companies in the world, wanted to more deeply understand the Android user in order to 1) acquire more Android users from competitors and 2) get existing customers to upgrade/expand their mobile technology ecosystem. In particular, they wanted to understand how Gen Z, Millennials and older customers thought about phone brand loyalty and identity, and how emotional drivers factor into tech decisions. They wanted to understand the tech ecosystem of Android users to reveal the pleasures, pain points, and desires of an Android user’s tech world.

What We Did:

Big Village created a 4-day Digital Hive with a 50/50 mix of Apple and Android users. Taking each of 150 members through an online learning agenda featuring ethnography, fill-in-the-blank mad libs, image annotation, website/screen safari review, and open response prompts (including text and voice-to-text and transcribed video) to uncover core “personas” or “mindsets” of Android vs Apple customers. We asked respondents about their tech personalities and the personalities of their tech products (focused on mobile phones), aiming to understand where personal identity and technology features and brand personality intersect. We asked who THEY thought the quintessential Android and Apple users were (what they care about, what their personalities are, how they are similar and different from each other) and asked if they felt they personally fit into the personas they identified. We dug into tech ecosystems, asking about expectations and experiences in tech interoperability and how it made them feel to have their devices work together (or not).

We then had them evaluate the products and services of competitors, and finished with having them create their perfect tech world – co-creating the perfect ecosystem that would serve the Android users in the best ways. To further uplevel the emotions, we used our text analytics tool to pull apart emotional drivers, tones, language and perspectives of Apple and Android users across age buckets and across phone type/brand within Apple and Android. All research, development and reporting was conducted by the Digital Hives team.

In the end, we were able to identify and bring to life 8 core customer personas that make up Apple and Android users based on behaviors, perceptions, emotional drivers, the priorities -specifically, their priorities in their tech ecosystems, their use-cases and perceptions of what their mobile phones should do for them, and their needs/wants when it comes to connection, innovation, financial decisions, brand loyalty and the need for community.

We then laddered these personas up to core recommendations for our client, focused on how specifically to speak to and reach core Android personas in their language and meet them where they are. We were able to isolate the specific emotional, logical and product benefits they should emphasize in order to encourage acquisition and upgrade.

The Result:

After the final presentation of insights, our client was thrilled about the speed, thoroughness and detail provided from the Hive that created these core personas, and they saw a clear answer that, in order to win Android users, they have to lean into emotional differentiations tied into logistically improving people’s tech worlds at a reasonable cost. Customers know that the differences between Apple and Android are becoming more insignificant by the day, so function and features are not going to be the winning point. Our client is now poised with specific ideas on how to make Android users feel that this mobile brand gets them and can be their partner in creating together an increasingly Android world.