What is segmentation?

Segmentation is the process of breaking down the general population into distinct groups (segments), united by certain behaviours or attitudes. By dividing people into distinct segments, you can optimise your offering and communications specifically for this group. Ultimately, in breaking your audience down from a monolith to manageable subsets of the population, you can tailor your brand to the needs, values and characteristics of a specific group of individuals.

While many brands will strive to have ‘their customer’ in mind, it’s important to acknowledge that in real life, there’s never only one type of consumer. With good segmentation, you can build out a strategy based on real, actionable insights that allow you to target your product development, messaging, creatives and acquisition plans to the right people, in the right place, at the right time. 

Because in modern-day business, context is king.

Why consumer segments as opposed to customer segments?

The brilliance of segmentation lies in its ability to optimise your strategy for connecting with the maximum number of people who might want your product or service (your Total Addressable Market is often the jargon used). In order for this to work, and to expand your TAM so that growth becomes easier, it’s important to widen your thinking beyond just your current customers.

Customer segments tell you where you’ve previously been success - they’re a snapshot of the past.

Great consumer segments will be expansive and forward-looking, helping you focus on the future. They will help you expand and grow into exciting new territories. Don’t restrict your brand to just mapping it’s existing customer bases, because it might rob you of a stellar brand expansion idea, or spotting a need amongst a group you’d not previously thought about.

What should you be thinking about when you segment?

There are four main things you need to be thinking about when it comes to segmentation. 

1. Attitudinal Understanding

This is primarily understanding how consumers view themselves and the world around them. By asking people about their underlying attitudes, their core beliefs, and their likes and dislikes, you can more easily demonstrate to them why your brand would be a good fit for their lifestyle. For example are you target consumers aspirational or worried about their place in the world? Optimists or pessimists? Extrovert or introvert? Do they care about health more than convenience? Provenance over cost? And so on...

Attitudinal understanding will help with messaging. It will tell you what your core mission statement needs to be to engage this segment of the population.

2. Motivational Understanding (commonly referred to as Need states or Jobs to Be Done)

Diving even deeper than understanding attitudes, there’s a powerful approach to segmentation and consumer understanding known as ‘need states’ (also known as ‘motivational states’). One methodology for discovering these is known as ‘Jobs to be Done’, which digs under surface motivations to understand why consumers really ‘hire’ different products to do particular ‘jobs’ for them.

For example, you may have two consumer groups that are both concerned about healthy eating and believe it’s important (shared attitudes) but they may still buy protein bars for very different reasons - one as a healthy, filling snack between meals; the other to refuel after an intense workout. Their ‘need states’ are very different, even if their attitudes are similar.

Understanding their motivations down to this level is incredibly powerful for developing messaging and creatives that almost feel personal the individual. If your brand spends a lot on digital acquisition (such as Facebook) then this level of segmentation will deliver brilliant ROI for your team as you can easily map it against the granular targeting options available on digital platforms.

3. Behavioural Understanding

This is primarily understanding when and how consumers will want to engage with your brand. Having a view of typical behaviour patterns will let you know which pockets of time, or which locations are going to be best for this demographic.

Work out how people live their lives—which social media channels they use and what mode of transport they take, for example—and you can work out where they’ll be most receptive to an advert, or find purchasing your product most convenient.

For example you might have consumers with the same attitudes and need states, but one works from home and lives in the country, while another is a commuter that lives in the city...how they access your products, their shopping habits, day-to-day lives, and even their media habits may be quite distinct, even while attitudes and need states are the same.

4. Demographic Understanding

This is primarily understanding what consumers need from your brand. There will be basic demographic factors that screen people in and out of a segment—how many children do they have, or what income bracket are they in, for example. This will make sure you don’t waste your time on people who fundamentally can’t be interested in your brand (you may want to screen out non-parents, if you make baby food, say) and leave you with the golden potential of those who will be.

Case Study: Tesco

Tesco’s messaging has traditionally been centred on families. Their slogan—every little helps—and their large stores, often only accessible by car, with product lines and reductions designed for people buying to feed multiple mouths are certainly family-friendly. In their most recent campaign, however, Tesco has identified all the consumer segments they might appeal to, and have produced messaging to reflect the diversity of their audience.

They are speaking to their usual demographic… 

 

But also, to the health-conscious millennial… 

They maintain their well-established position as a destination for good, reasonably-priced food that can be shared amongst the whole family… 

But they also become a destination for occasion food, putting themselves in direct competition with cafés and restaurants… 

It’s a campaign that embodies successful consumer segmentation: it takes Tesco’s basic offering and parcels it up for a wide range of consumer groups. It demonstrates that Tesco can be your destination whether the pie you want to cook is a high-cost ‘showstopper’, or a corner-cutting, great value ‘all-from-frozen’ affair (both featured in this campaign). They target various age groups, various behaviour patterns, with various attitudes to food, and show that whatever the occasion, Tesco should come to mind.

How can I start segmenting my audience using Attest? 

With Attest’s flexible scripting platform, huge audience reach and interactive dashboard, it’s the perfect place to start creating your consumer segmentation models.

Some agencies may insist you need to run 40-50 question surveys to run proper segmentation. We heartily disagree. With a smart approach, the use of grid questions and routing, and good planning about what you really need from segmentation, 23 questions is plenty. 

That equates to around 7 minutes in length for a consumer taking the survey, the maximum amount of time they will be fully engaged to answer questions, with real thought and consideration.

Most importantly, it means the data you get back will be much better quality than the data you receive from longer surveys. Almost every industry leading survey and data provider agrees—Surveymonkey, Qualtrics, Nielson...or as Research Now/SSI state, “The longer a survey is, the more that data quality past the midpoint suffers.”

Can you imagine making critical strategic decisions based on unengaged, rushed and incorrect data?! If you want to avoid that scenario, don't be seduced by overly long and complicated surveys!

Now we’ve got that straightened out, here’s how you might approach the survey.

Spread your net wide at the beginning, launching a survey to a nationally representative sample of people, looking at both people who already know of (or use) your brand and those who don't.

For segmentation you’ll probably want a sample size of 2000-3000, giving you enough data to dig into niche groups and apply multiple filters.

To learn more about their attitudes, you can question them about their views on your market, or life in general, e.g.

• Do you believe that a healthy and balanced diet is something to aim for?
• Why?
• Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
• Do you cheer for underdogs and reigning champions?
• Would you pay more for something that was environmentally friendly?

To discover their need states, and even gaps in the market, you can ask more qualitative ‘why’ questions, or test their reaction to key statements, e.g.

• On a scale of 1-5 how important is to you that you can find healthy snacks on the go?
• On a scale of 1-5 how easy do you find it to buy healthy snacks on the go?
• What do you wish you could improve about health snacks?
• Which of these statements do you most strongly agree with:
• I need healthy snacks on the go because I’m always travelling between meetings
• I need healthy snacks on the go because I work out a lot and need to refuel regularly
• I need healthy snacks on the go because I wake up late and don’t have time for breakfast

On behavioural understanding, you can get a sense of their media habits with some simple questions, such as:

• When did you last watch live TV?
• What programme did you watch?
• Which radio station(s), if any, do you listen to? [station optoins]
• When do you usually listen to them? [time options]
• Which social media apps do you have on your phone?
• Please rank which you use most to least

Finally you can learn more about their brand interests and loyalties, such as the brands they use (or know) in your space, and why they feel that way. For example:

• Why do you use [brand]?
• Please tick all of [brand]’s products that you use on a regular basis.
• Please choose the one product that [brand] make that you couldn’t live without.
• How likely are you to recommend [brand] to your friends?
• Would you recommend [brand] to people who are older/younger than you?
• Where do you typically purchase [brand]

As you can see from the above examples, it's great to mix quantitative and qualitative questions, to give you both statistically robust data and deeper insights that help inform your thinking.

You can use our interactive dashboard to select any of these answers, and map that specific group’s answers to other questions. So you’ll know that, for example, of the consumers whose favourite social media channel is Instagram, most of them usually buy your brand at the weekend.

What’s more, you can split the results by demographic. You’ll be able to split people’s answers by their age, their gender, their postcode, how many children they have, or even whether or not they have pets!

This way you can quickly build up specific segments based on attitudes, need states, behaviours and demographics.

When it comes to the people who don’t already use your brand, ask questions that will suss what it is that could open them up to your brand. Probe their motivations and mindset, and figure out the role your brand can play in their lives. This is where you might find some incredible opportunities to expand your Total Addressable Market (TAM) with even slight adjustments to your product or positioning.

If you’re a protein brand, for example, who has established a niche of customers who identify as fitness enthusiasts, it doesn’t mean that’s your entire target market. Ask people whether they’d like a healthier breakfast, where they’re most likely to buy snacks on the go, or when they notice themselves feeling tired.

You might find that within a certain demographic, there’s a desire for healthier workplace cupboard snacks to stave off hunger whilst cooking dinner, for example.

This group would share a similar attitude (valuing health), but would respond to different messaging (based on need states) which slots your product more neatly into their lives.

What to do with your segments?

A mistake many businesses make with segmentation is to approach it as a more academic exercise, often led by an external agency, where the result is a smart and impressive looking presentation. But how useful is it?

Typically is gets presented to big fanfare, then quietly forgotten until 2 years later when someone declares that “we must better understand our market and customers!” and the whole thing happens again!

We believe segments should be useful, actively applied tools for your whole organisation from marketing to product, leadership to interns.

There are two keys to this.

1. Don’t make the final segmentation too complicated or proprietary

It’s essential to have relatively simple, transferable and fluid ways of constructing and reaching segments in the future, outside of the initial segmentation exercise.

Otherwise, it’s like drawing a map in a secret code and not being given the key - this is only good for the original vendor who worked on your segmentation, because they hold the key and it remains proprietary to them.

Instead, for segments to be useful, you should be able to arrive at them utilising just 2-3 key statements (and maybe some demographic filters). Anything more convoluted than that and they’re likely too complex (and overly niche) to be useful. If you need to ask 12+ questions to get to your segment, something has gone horribly wrong!

You should be able to use your segments as a way to guide your media buying, product development, messaging and creatives.

If you’ve spent half the survey defining the segment, then we also know the second half of the data (the good stuff that you really want to know) will be less accurate because fatigue has set in.

2. Keep your consumer segments fresh

This is so important. People move segments all the time, as their habits, jobs and life situation change. Therefore if you constantly re-survey ‘saved segments’ you’re likely to be getting less and less accurate data as time goes by.

Instead you should re-survey consumers as then assign them to segments each time (hence the need to quickly and easily define them is so important), which keeps them a living and breathing tool for you to use when making decisions. Ultimately your segments need to be as dynamic as the general population.

Conclusion

Great Consumer Segmentation should help you inform your creative teams, your messaging, your media planning, product development and even your whole strategic direction.

Given the foundational role they can play across your whole organisation, it’s important you get them right. Hopefully this guide has proved an enlightening resource to get you thinking about segmentation in a fresh, more practical light.

If you’d like to learn more about using Attest’s platform as a way to build your own segments, we’d love to talk to you!