The FECI Fan Map is a powerful way to explain the relationship any individual or group has with music by segmenting people into Fans, Enthusiasts, Casuals and Indifferents.

To understand the first principles of FECI segmentation let's take a look at the Music Fan Map below. The central horizontal axis represents how 'engaged' an audience group is with music. At the left hand side of the axis are the 'Fanatics' and 'Enthusiasts'. These are people who invest almost crazy amounts of time, effort and money into their relationship with music. 

Over on the right are the 'Casuals' and 'Indifferents'. These are people with little or no interest in music who might struggle to recognise any of the tunes played at a wedding disco.

At a broad level The Fanatics are relatively small in number but represent the heaviest, most committed and profitable type of music consumer out there. Conversely, Casuals and Indifferents purchase less frequently and spend far less per head than the Fanatics and Enthusiasts, but thanks to their big population size represent a valuable high-volume market of light and irregular customers. This difference in market or audience size is represented by the Fan Map's funnel shape.

The Music Casuals

Music Casuals represent the core of the mainstream music audience, which makes them an important market for music-related brands and entertainment providers. They don’t commit the extraordinary levels of personal time, attention and income to music that distinguishes Fanatics or Enthusiasts, but the sheer number of Music Casuals makes them a valuable market. 

The key thing to remember about Music Casuals is that they are rarely willing to invest sufficient time, money or energy to explore beyond what the convenience of the mainstream has to offer. Music plays a welcome role in a Casual’s life but for most of the time other things are way more important. Music has a functional role as the soundtrack or background to the primary task of the moment – it enhances a Casual's mood when driving, working out, studying or socialising. Casuals use music as a lubricant for living,  but it's never the main event. 

Casuals get their main music fix from radio, video and social media.  They are less inclined to read about music and prefer a more visually based approach to consuming music.  The dedicated music press tends not to cover music in this way and Casuals find their musical interests better catered for in general entertainment and celebrity gossip content.

You might think Music Casuals are a homogenous group of music consumers, but this isn't true. To illustrate, let's take a look at two notional Music Casual sub groups that are broadly reflective of various FECI Segmentations Colourtext has undertaken. The name of each group is very suggestive of its character - they are Kitchen Disco and The Festival Parents.

Music Casual sub-groups

The Kitchen Disco group are regular fun loving parents who still feel young at heart and refuse to be left behind by fashion and modernity. Despite busy lives that revolve around work and family they don't want to be pigeonholed by age or parental role and still enjoy the fun and vibrancy of popular entertainment. Music plays a key role in keeping this group in touch with the world of their youth and their children. 

They want to stay young so try hard to keep up and remain engaged with what’s popular today. Familiar hits, whether old or new, are really important to the Kitchen Disco group because they are the songs everyone knows that act like a crucial bridge between the generations.

The Festival Parents are busy people with multiple family and career responsibilities. Music plays an important role in their lives because it helps define moods and complement different occasions. These guys know what a perfect Sunday morning record should sound like. When Festival Parents get a moment to relax they want to be their 'real selves', which means this group are looking for leisure with content. 

In musical terms this means experiences that feel spiritually rewarding or have intellectual resonance. They dislike chart pop because it’s perceived as cheesy, manufactured and over-played, which means they tend to reject anything that appears too mainstream.  However, on closer examination most of what they listen to has actually featured in the charts at some point.

Next to The Casuals on the FECI Music Fan Map are The Enthusiasts and The Indifferents. We can create a FECI Segmentation Fan Map for your brand and market - contact us now.