Somewhere between your most loyal customers and those yet to discover your brand lies a high-potential audience often left underutilized: the Movable Middle.
These are consumers who are active in your category (they shop, compare, and consider), but haven’t yet committed to any one brand. They’re not disengaged, nor are they deeply loyal. Instead, they sit in the middle, open-minded, brand-aware, and, as new data shows, highly responsive to well-timed, well-placed marketing.
In an increasingly competitive APAC media environment, where customer acquisition costs are rising and personalization fatigue is setting in, this segment offers a unique blend of scale and efficiency. According to MMA Global’s Movable Middles Growth Framework (MMGF), these mid-propensity consumers can be up to 5 times more responsive to advertising than the average shopper and campaigns built around them deliver over 50% stronger returns on ad spend than traditional reach-based plans.
In this article, we explore why more APAC marketers are turning their attention to the high-intent middle, and how this audience could become the most reliable growth engine in the next era of media strategy.
Who Are the Movable Middles, and Why Do They Matter?
The Movable Middle isn’t a new label, but it’s finally being quantified in ways that matter to modern marketers. Defined as consumers with a 20–80% probability of purchasing a specific brand, this segment occupies the wide, often overlooked middle ground between committed loyalists and unlikely prospects.
What sets them apart isn’t just where they sit on a graph – it’s how they behave.
Movable Middles are:
- Active in the category: They’re already buying similar products or services.
- Uncommitted to a single brand: They may have tried yours or your competitors’, but haven’t formed lasting preferences.
- Open to influence: Their decision-making is fluid, making them highly responsive to timely, relevant engagement.
According to MMA and Neustar’s Movable Middles Growth Framework, targeting this group isn’t just efficient, it’s significantly more effective. For one brand in the study, Movable Middles delivered nearly 5x the ROAS of the general population. And because they represent a broader segment than heavy buyers, the upside isn’t just in performance – it’s in scale.
Crucially, they offer predictability. Situated between brand fans and disinterested consumers, they represent a segment whose behavior can be shaped, not assumed. For marketers under pressure to deliver measurable impact, the Movable Middle offers a way to scale influence without compromising precision.
Targeting the Middle: From Theory to Execution
Understanding who the Movable Middles are is only half the equation. The real value lies in knowing how to identify and activate them, and that’s where the Movable Middles Growth Framework (MMGF) comes in.
Developed by MMA Global in collaboration with Neustar, the MMGF provides a data-backed methodology to pinpoint and engage the most responsive middle-intent consumers through a combination of:
- Model propensity: Use real-world purchase behavior to identify 20–80% likelihood audiences.
- Simulate outcomes: Run agent-based simulations to predict performance across synthetic yet representative consumer groups.
- Reallocate media budgets: Prioritize segments shown to deliver higher ROAS rather than defaulting to high reach or historical buyers.
The results speak for themselves:
- 50%+ lift in ROAS versus traditional reach-based plans.
- Broader penetration across light, medium, and even new buyers.
- Greater efficiency through outcome-focused targeting.
For APAC brands operating across diverse markets, this approach balances reach with relevance, minimizing waste while driving growth at scale.
The Playbook for APAC Marketers
To activate the Movable Middle, marketers must rethink how they plan, measure, and execute campaigns:
- Reframe audience design: Move beyond basic reach or loyalty models. Instead, focus on purchase probability and openness to influence.
- Align media investment with responsiveness: Use segment-level ROAS data to guide spending, not just CPMs or audience size.
- Build cross-functional integration: Ensure alignment between marketing, data science, and media operations to act on shared intelligence.
- Localize and adapt: APAC is heterogeneous. Apply the MMGF at a market level using locally relevant purchase and media behavior data.
- Think long-term: The Movable Middle isn’t a short-term acquisition play, it’s a sustainable growth strategy that compounds over time.
Closing Thought
In a region as dynamic and diverse as APAC, the Movable Middle offers marketers a scalable, measurable, and underleveraged growth engine. It’s not about choosing between loyalty and reach. It’s about recognizing that the most actionable opportunity may lie in the middle, with consumers who are ready to be influenced, if only you know where to look.
