The Challenge
When TikTok began planning a new global media campaign, it was clear that the brand needed to do something different. What wasn't clear, was what. At the time, most adults had only heard about TikTok because they had someone under the age of 18 in their family, or from news reports about what the young people were up to. Meanwhile, growth in the pre-college and college demographics had been so rapid that the saturation point had come as a bit of a surprise.
TikTok was facing two common challenges. The first was understanding the relationship between brand, product, and disparate user groups. The second was using that new customer understanding to reach a net-new audience. They needed to reach new demographics users in order to grow, but that growth meant a new target, and consequently a new market orientation. The social platform was facing an enormous growth plateau, and any new growth would have to come from older users.
Our challenge was, how do we help this brand age up and grow out?
The Work
TikTok's differentiator had been the application’s ability to react to behavioral data in real time, but that was only valuable once people were on the app. The product was sticky enough, but growth in older demographics would require a different kind of audience data to understand and address older users. Data from outside the app.
We set out to acquire that data. Most modern data collection techniques are designed for efficiency (focus groups), and reproducibility (surveys). The challenge with these approaches is their tendency to elicit inaccurate and low-value information. In this instance, we needed data that wasn't available anywhere but in the minds of our target audiences. The approach was one-on-one, Jobs To Be Done style interviews. This avoids the pitfalls of focus groups and surveys, and has been one of the best resources for high-value human insights. The task now was to go out and get it. And then make sense of it all.
Jobs To Be Done, and specifically the methods that I have been working on over the last decade, is instead designed to generate data that is both more accurate and more valuable. Through a number of techniques, including reverse-narrative storytelling, context discovery, competing forces, etc. Jobs To Be Done allows us to reveal a more complete view of the factors influencing consumer decisions in context.
The result is high-value and high accuracy qualitative information, but ultimately what TikTok got was a strategy that's built, not just for behavior change, but for changing the specific app behaviors of our target audience.
Findings and Recommendations
We compiled these interviews and discovered recurring themes across our audiences. There were consistencies across the journeys of users and non-users, showing how the app was adopted on individual levels and spread across groups. The work also revealed the hidden barriers that were preventing older audience adoption, revealing social and psychological barriers. Take a look at this TV spot and you can probably guess what our results said about the mechanisms where TikTok is spread, how older users were successfully using TikTok, and where people find the social value in using TikTok.
The Results
Our work defined the core challenges and growth opportunities for TikTok through audience targets and messaging concepts.
- TikTok's global campaign addressed both adoption barriers and motivational drivers.
- Usage quickly grew in the older demographics, and niche topics became more central to the TikTok experience.
- Revenue following the launch of that campaign grew nearly 3x, from $4B to $11.6B for the year (independent estimate).