From Rich Boland, Client Services, Precision Group
The research
The Research Agency (TRA) recently published Aussie Minds, a study of more than 2,000 Australians that argues demographics no longer explain people the way they used to. Beneath age, income and postcode, TRA identifies six “MindSets” underlying worldviews that shape what someone values, trusts and responds to. Two people who look identical on paper, same age bracket, same income, can sit in completely different MindSets and need completely different things before they will act.
I would recommend the full guide to any marketer because it is equally insightful and useful. What struck me, reading it as someone who runs a Client Services team at a printer and mailhouse rather than a brand team, was a quieter implication. A six-segment insight is only worth what your execution can deliver. If every one of them gets the same direct marketing message then the execution is below average.
Here is the practical problem. A television spot is one message to everyone. A billboard is one message to everyone. Even a lot of “personalised” digital collapses, in the end, into a handful of dynamic fields swapped into an otherwise identical email, on current numbers, roughly four in five recipients never open.
(Here’s the pitch…) Direct mail is one of the few channels that can carry genuinely different content, at scale, to different people in the same run. And do it in a format the recipient actually opens, keeps and trusts. We have written before about why physical mail keeps landing as Australia’s most trusted channel, and why even digital natives want a letter. The piece does work that a screen cannot. Trust and attention are the delivery mechanism. What you load into that mechanism is where the MindSet thinking earns its keep.
What this looks like across three MindSets
Take three of TRA’s six, and imagine the same brand (say a bank, or an insurer, or a super fund) mailing all three in one campaign.
The Keepers (TRA sizes them at around 26% of Australian adults, the largest group). Traditional, self-reliant, loyal, wary of anything that feels risky or wasteful. TRA’s read is that they respond to reliability, proof and respect and are put off by inflated promises and novelty for its own sake. The mail piece for a Keeper leads with track record, guarantees, the plain fact that the thing works. No breathless language. Position any innovation as proven improvement.
The Chasers (around 22%). Ambitious, progressive, future-facing, drawn to brands that feel authentic and values-aligned. And quick to punish anything that smells like greenwashing or purpose without substance. The piece for a Chaser leads with progress, autonomy and credible sustainability, and it had better back its claims. The exact same offer, framed for the exact same reason, but the proof points, the imagery and the tone are different objects.
The Mavericks (around 18%). Independent, skeptical of hype, values-led, allergic to being told who to be. For them, restraint is the thing. Plain speech, substance over spin, evidence they can check themselves. A Maverick will notice the gap between what a brand says and what it does faster than most, so the mail has to be honest to the point of understated.
Same campaign. Same week. Three physically different pieces…different headline, different hero image, different proof, arguably different paper stock and format, each engineered to a different trust code. That is not a creative flourish. That is a data-and-print problem.
And that is where printers stop being interchangeable
Producing three, or three thousand meaningfully different versions in one run is not a design task you hand to the printer at the end. It is a production capability that has to be built into the job from the data up. Most campaigns that attempt it come unstuck in the same place: variable fields mapped to a database that was never properly cleaned, de-duplicated or segmented. The result is wrong names, blank fields, a Keeper receiving the Chaser’s message, the opposite of the trust you were trying to build.
We treat data as a production input, with an in-house data team who consolidate, de-duplicate and segment before a single piece goes to press. I have written separately about how variable data printing actually works when the data strategy and the creative strategy are designed together rather than bolted together at the end.
The point is not that we own a clever press. It is that hyper-personalised mail lives or dies on the engineering underneath it. The data handling, the variable logic, the proofing across every permutation, the response tracking that ties a PURL or QR code back to the individual. Get that right and a six-MindSet strategy becomes a six-thousand-variant campaign that each recipient experiences.
The takeaway
TRA’s Aussie Minds is a useful reminder that the audience is not one audience. The follow-on, from where I sit, is that the strategy and the production line are not two separate conversations. Knowing your customer splits six ways is worth exactly nothing until something can act on it in the physical world. That “something” is the difference between a mailing house and a mailing house.
To pressure-test whether hyper-personalised mail belongs in your 2026 mix, talk to our team at info@thepg.com.au
Source: The Research Agency, Aussie Minds: Beyond demographics. Beneath behaviour. (2025/26). MindSet names, segment sizes and trait descriptions are TRA’s framework, cited here with attribution.
Photo by Gavin Jurajda on Unsplash
