Audience Segmentation Is Getting a Bad Rep: Try Designing With End Use in Mind

Recent discussions highlight that segmentation strategies have become so complex that they are virtually unusable. Marketers, in the pursuit of hyper-personalisation, have created segments that are too intricate to be practical.

A common pitfall is the lack of clarity on the purpose of segmentation. Without a clear understanding of how it will be applied, such as in guiding creative decisions and ad buying, the segmentation fails to deliver value. For instance, if segmentation is meant to inform media strategy, it must align seamlessly with media demographics.

Understanding consumers' personality traits, motivations, needs, wants, and values is crucial for marketers. This information helps craft messages and creative content that resonate on an emotional level, ensuring a strong connection with the target audience.

Go Deep on the Profiles

If you’re just focused on dimensions like demographics, you might end up with the King Charles and Ozzie Osborne syndrome. Both have an almost identical demographic and lifestyle profiles. You could even argue that some of their behaviors match; they both drive expensive cars and enjoy fine dining, but their attitudes, values and potential beliefs are likely to be very different. 

What truly differentiates one group from another? That would be purposeful and empathetic questionnaire development and well-developed target illumination and persona building.

With this deeper level of profiling, researchers can ensure that all parts of their organizations understand the audiences they are hoping to communicate with on a personal level. 

Link Segmentations Samples to Media Consumption

For example, applying innovative techniques to link segmentation samples to media consumption by demographic as well as behaviour, attitudes and values will ensure that lookalike segments on client data management platforms can offer enhanced media targeting. This means creatives and planners can maximise the value that deep human understanding and audience insights of a robust segmentation provides, giving clear competitive advantage.

Researchers understand the tension point between how broad or deep a segmentation needs to be. Consumers are complex beings and brands that want to connect and engage with them need to understand what’s important to their audience.  

Two Speed Targeting

Byron Sharp, the ‘mass market is best for brand building’ professor, suggests there are two speeds when it comes to targeting: mass market for brand building; target segments for activation at the bottom of the funnel.

This is a great way for researchers to remember that audiences are, ultimately, part of the masses and avoid the temptation of creating too many target boxes. It can be overly reductive to assume for example that all mothers with young children have the same aspirations, attitudes and behaviours. 

People are individuals, but how they behave around specific occasions as well as time of day or type of purchase, differs. Essentially consumers do dissimilar things at different times. As a result occasion-based segmentation can be particularly useful for repertoire categories that are predominantly defined by specific mood and need states. I am a mother with young children, but there are multiple versions of me depending on the occasion – such as mummy me, work me, one of the girls me, sporty me. 

This does not eliminate the role of boxes when it comes to outlining audiences. They help brands make sense of a mass market, where the temptation is to spray and pray to a mass market. 

Remember that it is the emotional connections that can play the biggest role in segmentation; simply because that is often what works the hardest to make brands relevant and meaningful. These are also unlikely to be found in a broad-brush approach. 

Tailor Your Story

Segmentations are a powerful and an essential tool for insights teams to appeal to the habits and needs of target audiences. They help brands to challenge established perceptions, change how they go to market and build lifetime value with customers. But regardless of whether they are broad or complex, they must be designed to meet the business and brand growth needs. 

There is so much more potential to make the latest marketing science techniques and tools more powerful than ever in the service of advertisers.

If you are planning to create a new market or customer segmentation or update an existing one - keep these three principles in mind:

1. Start at the end

Creating a meaningful segmentation that is adopted throughout an organisation begins at the end. By defining the objective you want to reach – why do you need a better consumer understanding and how will it impact business decision making for example – you give purpose to the journey. 

2. Define how the learnings will be used

Once you are clear on why you need better understanding, you'll know the right way to approach the segmentation that will add value to the business. Agree up front how you will use the learning across the business. How will you socialise? How will you measure success and impact? Segmentations are investments and all investments need to deliver a measured ROI. As Peter Drucker once famously said – if it matters, measure it. And if it's measured, it gets managed.

3.Reductive thinking

Segmentations are about making shortcuts, to help simplify the complex. However, generic assumptions lead to bad decision making. Strike the balance between understanding and oversimplification. At the end of the day, it’s way to better understand why we all do what we do – and that can differ for many reasons. Identify the big influencers and build out from there.