Why Segmentations Sometimes Fail
Episode 02
Market Segmentation: Episode 02 Transcript
Hi, I’m Bonnie Janzen with Decision Analyst. I’m an Executive Vice President and I’m here today to talk with you a bit about why segmentations sometimes fail. So, these are common pitfalls that we see in segmentation work.
Political considerations are always important in research, and especially important in segmentation, because you know you’re going to develop the segments and use them in many ways across many aspects of the business. So you really have to think about your key stakeholders and who are they, and making sure that you’re in complete alignment. You want to think about those key stakeholders and what is their past experience with segmentation. Either a good or a bad experience they may have had with your organization or in their previous lives before being with your company. We may find that they have had a bad experience, you may find that they actually are in love with a segmentation you’ve done in the past and, therefore, don’t feel like they want to evolve or modify that. So, it’s really important to understand those underlying issues with the stakeholders.
In addition, it’s important to think about the selection of your team—again, both internal and external partners (who you’re using as a research vendor). Also, who the team is internally, making sure that we’re all in alignment, and we all have a clear understanding of the objectives. It’s also important to think about those objectives and make sure they’re very tight, and that everyone’s in agreement, because we may find that some of our clients want to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the segmentation research. They want to learn everything about this particular brand or this particular aspect of their business.
So, qualitative is usually where we start the segmentation process, and we’re going to be covering that in more detail, but it’s really important to understand the emotional engagement and how your consumers and your customers engage with your brand and with your products and services.
In addition, technical aspects of the research plan are important, and these will be covered in more detail in other segments of our video series. But the sampling and making sure that it’s broad and not too narrow, we have had occasions where a client may say we want to do a segmentation among women who are 25 to 34, who have two children... well, it’s so narrow already, segmentation becomes very difficult.
So, we want to make sure there’s plenty of segments (not too many, not too few), that they represent enough business that you could make them a significant target for your company, and that they’re reachable by media in some way. And again all of those will be covered in other segments of our videos.
So, at the end of the day, what’s really most important is that you understand who your segments are, what drives them, and what are the best ways to communicate with them, and then, also, the other part of that is making sure you understand their value to your business, and then that helps you deliver the best segmentation to your organization.
The other thing that is really important in considering segmentation is how you wrap the process up— making sure you’ve done a good job in profiling, in persona and development, you have pictures, you have videos of these people talking about your business or your brand or your product. Provide cheat sheets to people in your organization so they can look at the image of that person that represents that segment. And do workshops and socialization of this information throughout your organization to really make it successful and make it a part of everyone’s business day.
So, our next video in this series will be segmentation types. I hope you can join us. Thank you very much.
Presenter
Bonnie Janzen
President
Bonnie helps drive growth for client companies based on strategic consumer insights, innovation, and analytics to shape marketing campaigns and new product development programs. She has consulted with clients on new business mergers and acquisitions including global expansion. Advertising and messaging research is a particular passion. She has been very involved in strategic direction of the company.
