Social Insights Reveal New Consumer Truths About Dads

Dad… just when you think you know him, right? He’s always got a new hobby, a new venture, or a new fad that he’s into.

As it turns out, though, “Dad” isn't a one-size-fits-all term. Dads exist in many different forms and have different interests, beliefs, values, parenting styles, and hobbies.  But one thing all dads have in common? The kids. Being a dad impacts everything they do - how they behave, what they believe, and what they buy.

While dads will always be dads, it's a losing strategy for any brand or business to bucket them under one universal persona.

In this Social Insights Report for Dads Personas, you’ll find surprising data on dads that will alter the way you and your brand think about dads. Taking insights derived from social and online conversations about self-described fathers, these 6 online social personas for dads were created:

So, what did we learn about these dads? And what does it mean for you? Here are the biggest takeaways from from our latest in-depth social insights report on Dads:

Dads Have Purchasing Power

One major takeaway from audience segmentation with social listening is that common held assumptions are completely shattered by the data.

For dad audience segments, it’s a big one: today's dads are shoppers!

In sharp contrast to some commonly held assumptions, Millennial dads dominate purchase-based conversations compared to past generations, underscoring the importance of marketing effectively to younger dads.

When you breakdown purchase conversation by each of the featured personas, it’s clear that all of them express intent to buy, and that the kids have an impact on shopping behaviors for dads. Interestingly, Creative Dads and Fitness Dads lead the way in purchase conversations online:

Dads bust stereotypes by posting their interests online

Understanding how consumers think and feel is one of the toughest tasks brands have so they can effectively reach the right people and deliver the right offers.

What better way, then, to figure out what dads think and feel than listening to what they actually say firsthand? Analyzing leading topics and key phrases from social conversations by dads, it’s clear: dads define themselves in a myriad of ways and vary greatly on interests and activities.

We analyzed common topics and related keywords for dads using our new interactive Topic Clusters feature to prove that the reality of dad interests breaks from the common stereotypes. Many dads describe themselves as creative, entrepreneurial, tech savvy, and video gamers, far from the typical dad prescription:

Knowing how dads describe themselves and their experiences is crucial to learning how they buy and predicting their future behavior.

Building Dad Personas for Your Business is Possible

Pinpointing dads personas, or any audience segment your brand needs insight on, is possible using social listening tools. Platforms like Infegy Atlas make it easy to identify social personas and understand key metrics about specific audiences like dads.

With the right tools you can both identify audiences and uncover key data on consumer behaviors and experiences within that audience segment.

Let’s quickly go over how dads personas can be found and analyzed:

How to define your audience segments:

To hone in on the dad audience, you can quickly research keywords referencing kids and being a father and also filter your data by gender for male voice. You can also specifically search online bios for mentions of being a dad or father.

Once you find your universal persona, in this case dads, you can drill down into keywords, topics, interests and activities to find your top sub-personas.

For example, for the Entrepreneur Dad persona, we found that many dads mentioned being a business owner or founder and discussed what it was like running a business while also being a father:

To see how we discovered all of our dad persona insights, download the report, where we also include a step-by-step guide to using social listening to analyze social personas.

Conclusion

Have you figured dads out, yet?

The dad persona is complex. No two dads are alike. But what they say about themselves, their experiences, and their lifestyles clues you into who they are as consumers and how being a dad impacts their behavior.

One thing is for certain: dads are anything but the sitcom stereotype. The biggest mistake a brand can make is assuming anything about dads.

What you need now is a platform that gives you better insight about audience segments like dads, and a game plan for how to use that data.

The dads persona report provides both -- brand new data on dad consumers you don’t want to miss, and a guide on how we found the insights and how to apply them yourselves.