General Overview

This guide provides marketers with an introduction to the DCI. With the DCI, companies will be able to understand and approach Europe as a diverse and complex market.

With the DCI, companies will be able to understand and approach Europe as a diverse and complex market.

DCI data on Personality, Lifestyle, and Routines highlights that not all European countries are the same and that it is important to adapt two things: (1) how to communicate and relate with the people of any given European country, and (2) what to communicate about.

This way, the DCI offers a more accurate assessment at early stages of strategic planning that allows marketer to avoid two pitfalls: (1) to address Europe as a single market and, (2) to hyper-localize the European market by addressing Europe country by country.

The DCI data captures lived culture of the countries of Europe by looking at their music, content, and search preferences.

As such, it can reflect a country’s culture over the long-term (Personality, Spotify, 1 decade), the short-term (Routines, Google Trends, 12 months) and the immediate trends of the present (Lifestyle, YouTube, daily top trending channels over a 1 week period in Feb 2024). From cherished music over to popular search to trending content - the DCI is indicative of a country’s broader culture, reflecting the interaction of a more stable cultural undercurrent with the tides of global digital culture trends.

The DCI

We additionally created 6 digital culture archetypes that group countries based on cultural similarities, which allows companies to target European countries through 6 clusters - and these are often not bound by geographical proximity, so we see many unexpected group compositions. A meaningful starting point for companies wanting to understand and enter the European market.

The three dimensions of the DCI allow also for a more focused approach of segmenting Europe on a specific dimension of relevance. Based on each dimensions’ performance, marketers can turn insights of the DCI into action by, for instance, using (1) Personality profiles to adjust tone of voice and messaging of their communication activities, (2) Lifestyle to identify the strength of localization of a given market along with its implication for content interest and preferences, and (3) Routines to determine possible content touch points with Europe’s audiences.

For each dimension - Personality, Lifestyle, and Routine - four distinct value combinations offer 4 different ways of targeting European audiences, providing a total of 12 different targeting strategies.

You will find more on each dimension in our other blog posts on Europe through the lens of Personality, Lifestyle, and Routine.

Important: All scores are relative to sample means. They capture difference between the country and the sample mean. Conclusions should be drawn accordingly.