CRAFTING A WINNING SEGMENTATION
Segmentation can provide a fantastic lens into who your customers are and how you can meet their unique needs. But you might be asking, what can I do with it?
Attitudinal segmentation is best described as compartmentalizing your customers' worldviews and how it relates to your offering. You should already have the marketing basics, such as demographics, purchase trends, etc...but sometimes these are not enough. To go deeper and connect with customers on a much more personal level, you need to comprehend their attitudes to life and how your products or services fit into their lifestyle.
For instance, a recent study we conducted focused on buying habits in the shaving category. This study assessed basic attitudinal information about buying ("The brands I buy say a lot about who I am") as well as more category-specific offerings ("I like to purchase shaving products online").
By running these statements through a series of analyses, including factor analysis and latent class segmentation, seven unique segments emerged.
The design of the questions is crucial, however. The questions should interlink with each other sufficiently so that the analysis will determine a pattern. The data can then be analyzed to detect if the answers to particular questions are clustering together and give you a say on how people are feeling. It is only by wording the questions correctly that you will be able to make this kind of informational leap successfully.
How useful is attitudinal segmentation in reality?
Done right, attitudinal segmentation will enable you to gain insights into how best to tweak your marketing to customers in a meaningful
manner.
It can impact the following areas:
1) Understanding if your brand equity aligns with a certain consumer segment or segments. This can be used to target consumers you want to win with.
2) The consumer journey. By customizing the journey based on key elements of what a segment wants or does not want, you can curate the experience to increase sales.
3) Using the segments as a primary lens can uncover new product development opportunities or areas to hone in on messaging.
In a perfect world, you could customize your experience to each individual consumer you interact with. In the real world, this is not possible, but by grouping people into one of several personas, you can develop a more customized experience that separates your brands from the sea of clutter.
Returning to the earlier shaving example, you are likely to find that potential buyers of shaving
consumers split into two groups. One set focused primarily on convenience. The other group believes that quality is paramount and they are willing to pay more for products. By utlizing the above framework, you could:
1) Create two sets of messages (one focused on convenience and one on quality) that you send out to each unique audience of segments.
2) You could customize product recommendations that highlight either convenience or quality, which is more likely to boost incremental sales.
3) You could think of new product or consumer journey opportunity areas focused on each segment. For example, could our brand offer luxury shaving products? Could we create a monthly subscription service?