What Northern Soul teaches us about knowing your audience

Northern Soul is often described as a music movement, but that undersells what it really was. It was a way of life built around participation, identity and shared understanding. People bonded over rare records, distinctive dance styles, how they dressed, where they travelled, and how deeply they committed. Some dipped in occasionally. Others structured their lives around it. Crucially, it was never static. What counted as authentic evolved, scenes shifted, tastes splintered and reformed.

That nuance matters, because Northern Soul also shows what happens when you get an audience wrong.

Much like today, music fans in the 60s and 70s were far from a single group. Many loved chart music. Others actively rejected it. A track that worked perfectly well for one audience could be a complete turn-oI for another. Slade’s Cum On Feel the Noize has since become an advertising staple, including in a 2022 British Heart Foundation campaign. It is not bad music, and it can be very eIective in the right context. But play it to a Northern Soul purist at the time and any sense of aIinity would have vanished instantly.

The lesson is not about musical taste. It is about understanding identity and context. Connection only works when you recognise who someone is and what they value, not just what is popular or broadly appealing.

Dealing with increasingly complexity

Modern platforms like Spotify do an impressive job of catering to eclectic tastes. Each year, Spotify Wrapped reminds us just how varied individual behaviour really is. Hundreds of genres, shifting moods, diIerent listening contexts; alone, commuting, exercising, hosting friends. Taste is not inconsistent, it is situational.

But the fragility of that understanding is obvious too. People are protective of their algorithms for a reason. Shared accounts, family devices, party playlists and borrowed phones all distort the signal. You might carefully curate your listening habits, only to undo it in one evening by putting your phone in the middle of the room and letting everyone add tracks. The algorithm is not wrong. It is simply working with blended signals that no longer represent a single person.

How our connection with music should inform our strategy

For years, brands have talked about connecting with audiences while relying on fragments to define them. An email address here. A device there. A click, a search, an IP. Each signal tells part of a story, but none tells the whole thing. When those signals are treated as a person, frequency breaks down, sequencing becomes guesswork, and relevance suIers. You do not know if you are speaking to the same individual again and again, or several people who happen to share a household, a device, or a login.

The problem becomes sharper in channels like connected TV, where storytelling and repetition really matter. Take a brand like FatFace. Its appeal cuts across age, life stage and motivation. Within one household you might have very diIerent relationships with the brand, from loyal customers to occasional browsers to people who have never engaged at all. Without a stable view of who is actually being reached, campaigns risk overserving some while missing others entirely.

When FatFace matched its data across channels to a consistent, accurate view of the customer, it gained visibility into journeys from awareness through to conversion. The result was not just cleaner reporting. A subsequent campaign delivered an incremental revenue return of 3 to 1, and new customers reached across multiple channels were 3.8 times more likely to visit the FatFace website. That is what changes when you stop acting on proxies and start acting on people.

Northern Soul worked because it respected individuality within a shared culture. It recognised that depth of engagement mattered, that context mattered, and that getting it wrong had consequences. Marketing faces the same reality.

Moving beyond age, gender, page views and searches is not about sophistication for its own sake. It is about mapping intent to a real person, understanding their relationship with your brand, and knowing when and where to act. That is how you build trust, grow lifetime value and stay relevant over time. Not by guessing who your audience might be, but by actually knowing them.