How Is Behavioral Audience Segmentation Different?
Just so you know, you're not alone. It's not easy to bring a perspective shift to a team or an organization. How are others coping with it? I received this encouraging email from Laura Hansen at California State University East Bay.
"I'm trying to champion your methodology here at work, as it's been very helpful so far in organizing the project. It is still challenging for me to abandon my marketing demographic mindset (was I really that brainwashed?-- not that I was ever all that convinced) for something more real and personal, but things are moving in good directions."
Laura's talking about the way I encourage you to look at your audience from a behavioral point of view, rather than a demographic or strictly psychographic point of view. Psychographics? For example, the hotel group Joie de Vivre creates hotels that are each unique from the other, based on the psychographics of the readers of a particular magazine. People going to the Hotel Vitale in San Francisco are readers of Dwell magazine. They like modern, simple, organic ... but the readers of this magazine may behave differently. One reader may be inclined to act on suggestions to reduce her carbon footprint and cut out pictures of modern architecture she likes while another may just enjoy reading the magazine and then donating it to the local dentist's office, treating it as entertainment rather than influence. Their psychographic may be similar, but their behavior is different.
Comments
I don’t understand why it has to be one approach or the other. McKinsey just published a report in Research World which mentioned this. I summarized the findings here:
http://www.tomhcanderson.com/2008/04/29/high-performing-companies-all-use-text-analytics-and-don%e2%80%99t-mix-their-segmentation-and-crm/
Our company's segmentation methodology (Anderson Analytics), combines the best from CRM/DM, Behavioral and Emotive segmentation techniques. Good segmentation schemes have to be both strategic as well as actionable.
-Tom
Posted by: Tom H. C. Anderson | April 29, 2008 12:20 PM
Tom, the behavioral/philosophic/motivational segmentation comes first. Then I apply some demographics to it to help select whom to recruit. In your words, you have labeled the first "strategic" and the second "actionable," and I have no idea why. Your article does not explain what you mean by "actionable"; instead the article says you have had great success marrying the two for your clients, which makes sense. I would not divorce the two, but I would emphasize the behavioral segmentation over the demographics. Segmenting by the way a person behaves is very "actionable" and concrete, in that suddenly you know the difference between a group you *thought* existed and the group that really does. I start with a hypothesis and then I always change it later based on the study. If you read the book, you'll see examples like how I started with one set of segments and change to a new set. The book goes through the details. For example, at Engage, the social dating site, we started with:
And ended with different groups that had their roots in the original groups, but truly had different philosophies and motivations:
Perhaps you can explain why CRM and Direct Marketing seem to depend upon demographics only.
Posted by: Indi Young | April 30, 2008 08:48 AM