Doelgroepion

Doelgroepion is a term used in marketing and product development to describe a synthetic, highly granular representation of a target audience. It is a data-informed abstraction that aggregates demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes into a single model intended to guide planning, messaging, and design decisions. Doelgroepion is not a real person, but a construct that can be used to simulate responses and test scenarios without exposing real individuals.

The term is a neologism appearing in contemporary practitioner literature and workshops. Data sources commonly fed into a doelgroepenion include surveys, customer relationship management data, website analytics, social listening, and qualitative interviews. Typical attributes cover demographic profile, motivations and pain points, media habits, channel preferences, and potential barriers to conversion. Modelling methods range from clustering and persona synthesis to scenario generation, with the aim of producing actionable profiles for cross-functional teams.

Applications include guiding content creation, messaging variants, product feature prioritization, and user experience testing. Doelgroepions help align teams around a shared representation of a segment and can speed up iterative testing and decision-making. However, they carry risks: overgeneralization, stereotyping, data bias, and the neglect of intra-segment diversity or changing preferences over time.

In relation to established concepts, doelgroepion is closest to buyer personas, market segments, and customer journey maps, but is designated as a constructed model rather than a single persona. The term is used primarily in practitioner contexts and does not yet have formal academic standards.