Our four segmentation approaches
In an increasingly complex and evolving marketplace, understanding your audience is paramount to brand success. Different segmentation strategies provide unique lenses through which to view your audience, and each reveals distinctive insights. As such, the utilization of all four - Market Consumer Segments, Existing Customer Segments, Social Audience Segments, and PROMPT Audience Segments - is an essential part of a comprehensive segmentation strategy. It's akin to using multiple sources of light to fully illuminate a room. By leveraging these four approaches, you ensure your brand's understanding of your audience is as complete and nuanced as possible, enabling you to engage more deeply, attract new customers, respond to changing affinities, and explore novel growth strategies. Each approach complements the others, leading to a multifaceted understanding that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The importance of language
One approach often serves as the 'primary' segmentation, which is used as the language the brand uses to understand and communicate about its audience. Just as a language provides a structured and shared way to express ideas, so too does a primary segmentation offer a common framework to understand, discuss, and engage our audience.
The importance of this segmentation-as-language cannot be understated. It helps us think about our audience with increased clarity and precision. It enables us to have more fruitful discussions and debates about our audience, and it allows us to convey these insights to others effectively. In other words, it empowers us to bring others along on our journey of audience understanding.
Our four distinct approaches are:
Market Consumer Segments: This approach provides a holistic perspective of the entire market, allowing you to identify untapped growth opportunities in existing and potential new audiences. The process involves a survey to gather data which we cluster based on people's category-related needs. These clusters then provide clear indicators of not only your existing Core and Casual customer groups but also of potential consumer segments that might be attracted to your brand in the future. The strength of this approach is that it provides a comprehensive view of the market, presenting opportunities to both engage more deeply with existing customers and attract new ones. This survey is usually informed by expertise, industry interviews, AI and qualitative work and can be fielded to targeted audiences who are representative of the market as well as your existing audience and customer base.
Existing Customer Segments: Focusing on your brand's current customers, this strategy employs your own customer data, including engagement metrics and transaction records, to cluster your existing customers. The power of this approach lies in its ability to understand the deep-seated needs of your current customers, even when the available data might not be as rich as survey data. Through careful selection and creation of variables, we can find valuable insights that help in further engaging your existing customers.
Social Audience Segments: This technique leverages the power of social media and the real-time, organic data it provides. By clustering social media audiences based on their Twitter interests, a unique segmentation emerges that captures the dynamic and ever-changing affinities of the market. Using tools such as Affinio and Audiense makes this process efficient and effective, providing supplementary insights that can assist in both tactical and strategic decision-making. This approach excels in helping brands keep their fingers on the pulse of the market's changing preferences, aiding in formulating an impactful communications strategy for both new and existing audiences.
PROMPT Audience Segments: An innovative and AI-driven approach, PROMPT Audience Segments combines our deep expertise in segmenting audiences with the power of artificial intelligence to explore and classify audiences. By querying billions of online comments, posts, and ideas, this approach doesn't require any social, survey, or transaction data, making it an accessible and cost-effective solution for businesses aiming to develop a hypothesis for a data-backed growth strategy. While it cannot fully replace traditional primary research methods, it serves as a powerful, quick, comprehensive, and adaptive tool that can bring you a significant step closer to finding the optimal answer.
Each of these segmentation approaches has its unique strengths and provides valuable insights depending on the needs of your brand. By choosing the most suitable approach (or a combination of approaches), you can develop a clearer understanding of your audience and devise more effective strategies to engage them, ultimately driving your brand's growth.
Clear recommendations
Regardless of the segmentation approach employed, we draw upon our vast experience in shaping brands' strategies across multiple industries to provide comprehensive and actionable recommendations. We identify your "Now," "Next," "Not Yet," and "Never" audiences, all critical elements in your brand's roadmap.
AI in everything we do
Each of these approaches is augmented with the power of AI. We leverage AI to enhance our planning, brainstorming, ideation, and communication processes, leading to quicker and clearer results. This helps us articulate data-driven insights more effectively, ensuring you understand the implications and potential of our work.
Despite the role AI plays in enhancing our process, don't think we've moved on from hard data. We still place critical importance on the raw data and hard, data-driven insights that form the foundation of every approach.
A package for every brand
Whether you're a small startup looking for growth or a world-renowned brand looking to expand your audience, we can package our approaches to suits your needs. Remember, our focus isn't just on the data; it's on helping you to understand your audience and develop strategic plans to engage them better. We're driven by truth and are committed to making a big difference for your brand.