Nathaniel Thiele

This month I learned the difference between real customers vs targeted customers for a company called Masterworks.io. Masterworks.io is an art investment platform that allows inventors to buy fractional shares in pieces of artwork. If you want to follow my progress and see how I reached my goals, feel free to explore around.

The Real Customer

To learn the real vs target customer, I first watched 10 ads to explain who the targeted customer was. Next, I built a survey in SurveyMonkey based on the ads and distributed it to 680 people with a total response ratio of 68 people. I filtered the data and found some interesting trends about the real customers. The data is about real customers and potential customers.

Of the 65 people, only 9 invested in art. Of those only 2 people of those 9 had heard of Masterworks.io. 

7 people had heard of Masterworks.io from 68 responses.

Key Traits of investors in Art

• Five respondents were females and four were males.

•  3 respondents were from Kansas, 2 were from Indonesia, 1 from Oklahoma,1 from Texas, 1 from Florida, and 1 was from New York

• Five respondents were White or Causain, 2 were Asian, 1 was African American/African Origins, and  1 was Hispanic

• 8 out of 9 respondents had no alternative investment outside of cash, stocks, and real estate, one had private business ownership

• 4 preferred investments in real estate as their favorite investment class, 2 preferred investments in stocks as their favorite investment class, 2 preferred investments in cryptocurrency as their favorite investment class, and 1 preferred investments in private business as their favorite investment class.
• The most disliked asset class was cryptocurrency with 4 respondents and the second most disliked asset class was stocks with 3 respondents. Mutual funds and real estate both had one person dislike them as an asset class
• 6 of the responses were most familiar with Pablo Picasso. The other artists (Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, and Jean-Micheal Basquiat) had one vote each.

Actual Customers or Informed Consumers

Here are some traits I noticed from the 7 respondents who knew about Masterworks.io. The customers were from Texas or the Midwest. 2 of the respondents were not from the midwest or Texas but instead were from Florida and Indonesia.

 4 respondents were females and 3 were males. Most of the respondents were Caucasian/White with 4 of the respondents being White. 2 respondents were Asian and 1 respondent was of African American/African origins. 

5 of the respondents made an income of $20,000 or less, but 2 of the respondents made an income of $100,000 or more. 

Most of the respondents (5) had no alternative investments outside of stocks, real estate, or cash. Those that had alternative investments(2) had investments in private business ownership.

The most liked asset class by informed customers was stock(3). Real estate, private business ownership, none, and cryptocurrency each had 1 vote. 

Real estate, stocks, and cryptocurrency tied with 2 votes for the least favorite asset class. 1 person voted none as their favorite asset class. 

Only two of the respondents invested in art with the rest of the respondents not investing in art. 

Pablo Picasso was the most well-known artist with 4 votes, followed by Claude Monet with 3 votes. 

Real Customer 

The real customer was primarily white/Causation, from Texas, making either $20,000 per year or $100,000 per year, and very few customers invested in art. They primarily invested in stocks however, the asset class they disliked was not uniform. 

Private business was also common, so if you have a business you might want to invest in art as a “hedge” to protect your business during periods of high inflation (Inflation is the devaluing of money).

 From this study of analyzing data, I learned that most people’s perception of Masterworks.io was the company was selling NFT (Non-Fugiable Tokens). With the next step of the project being to build ads, I will build ads that are memorable and change the misconception about Masterworks.io.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

The real customer provided valuable data for which I can start to build a small ad campaign to target people who are the real customers. I learned that real customers either have very low incomes or very large incomes. 

I will also try to build an ad based on Pablo Picasso. Instead of having the famous artist Pablo Picasso, I would have a dog named Pablo which could be a mascot and associate with Masterworks.io. This will help relate to customers as well as design a more memorable ad campaign.