Journal
Mapping GB app audiences beyond postcode theatre
British product organisations love a map. Heat maps of installs by local authority look like knowledge. They often encode broadband, shared phones, and the opening hours of a library more than they encode desire.
App Audience Intelligence in Great Britain has to notice devices that belong to a household, not a person. It has to notice that a “return on Sunday” might be a parent catching up after a shift pattern, not a leisure persona. Postcode theatre — colouring the nation until the slide looks national — is a way of avoiding those sentences.
We ask teams to add a connectivity note to every slice card. Not a statistic from a national report: a note from their own sessions. Did the webview fail in a rural commute? Did biometric login fail in a cold porch? Those are audience facts. “North vs South” rarely is.
Public-sector wrappers deserve extra care. An audience that must complete a form is not a fanbase. Treating them as a retention problem can produce messages that feel like harassment. Our East Midlands residency spent a week writing exclusions for kiosk users whose pauses were about printers.
If your organisation still needs a map, draw one of exclusion zones: places where your metric is not about the people you think. That map is uglier. It travels better into a planning meeting in Swayfield or anywhere else.