Part 1 of a 2-part series
Strategists and planners have long recognized the benefits of directing products and communication towards key audience segments. It’s no secret that aiming your message at the masses minus any key insight to help some group connect with your message is a good way to blow your budget without having anything to show for the effort. But how do you decide who to talk to?
Paralyzing effect of too many choices
There are plenty of models to wade through. You could start with Jungian archetypes as a foundation and search for the balance between your brand archetype and your consumer archetypes. You could use a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator or DiSC profile, or maybe even the nine Enneagram types to deep dive into your audiences. You can dive into the behavioral subsets, or geographic, demographic, psychographic samples. You could add filters of age group, lifestyle, income, section of the country or world, background, life stage, shopping habits, and so much more.
You could. But should you?
Simpler may be better
I have found that when I’ve tried to discuss this kind of approach with the average brand or marketing manager not already well versed in the concept, they get frustrated and aim for something simpler. Worse still is when I’ve worked with a brand that insisted on spending the money on an expensive study only to get a report back that was so complicated that few in the company wanted to use the results in their daily activity.
Brand foundation tools that people don’t use are a waste of company resources and may actually cause well-intentioned staffers to go off on their own directions not out of any desire to damage the brand but to simply get something done.
I think there is a way to frame the audiences for almost any brand, whether B2B or B2C, so that internal groups can begin to make progress on how to innovate and communicate with people the brand personnel know intuitively.
I think we need to get to strategic tools brands will actually use.
Primal behaviors
After being involved in consumer and customer segmentation studies for more than 20 years and in dozens of categories, we took a look at unifiers and differentiators in the various studies and came to recognize that at the root of all the studies are five essential, what I’ll call primal, behaviors.
Think of these as how we each are hardwired and not necessarily influenced by external factors. The five primal behaviors are: Value; Practical; Performance; Prestige and; Experiential.
Before I break them down let’s set a few ground rules:
First, people may very well float between different behaviors depending on categories or balance two behaviors at the same time. That doesn’t create hazy profiles. Instead, it helps clarify the emotional continuum most of us move through seamlessly every day.
Second, these behavioral groups aren’t meant to be the exhaustive psychographic profiles. They serve as a base on which each brand can build common understanding of who they want to pursue and how to speak to that group. Run your volumetric, market size and market impact studies. Just don’t think you can’t make any progress with innovation and marketing communication without them. You can, and many brands do so every day.
Five Behavior Types
Value:
This group looks for a deal and considers themselves savvy shoppers. They can’t imagine paying full price for an item when they could just as easily get the same item or something very close to it for significantly less somewhere else. (think TJ Maxx’s Maxxinistas). It doesn’t mean they want to compromise on quality. They don’t. They would rather search for coupons and bargains for the kind of quality they would like to have instead of rushing to conclusions and spending money unnecessarily.
Practical:
Practicals want reliable products and services that live up to their promises. They look for function over form. They are willing to give up style points in favor of products that do a job very, very well. Many of my engineer friends and family fit in this category. They’re the first to check for manufacturing details and can tell me all about the product specs. For example, Practicals can tell you whether that Kenmore product you like is made by Bosch, Whirlpool, Samsung or Jenn Air. Why would this matter? Because Practicals pride themselves on knowing the details.
Performance:
This group can sometimes be the other end of the continuum for Practicals in that they look for function WITH form. They want products that work, but they also want the style points that can come with it. This is a big point for the Performance group: style matters. For example, while the Practicals might choose a Ford F-150 pickup truck for its towing capacity, durability and proven track record, they often draw the line on the extras that make the truck look or feel better to riders. Not the Performance group. They would also choose the F-150 for the durability and track record, but they would consider the upgrades, from 10-speed automatic transmission on a high output, twin-turbocharged, 450 horsepower, 3.5-liter EcoBoost engine to driver-assist technology and an integrated SYNC system to keep all their devices connected. All that technology just has to make the truck perform better.
Prestige:
Stepping up one more notch is the Prestige group. This group would prefer to stay out of discussions about F-150s because while Fords may have a proven track record, they don’t have the badge and talk value the Prestige group craves. They like having stories to share with others about the brands and products they choose. Why have a regular wristwatch when you could have a Breitling or Patek Philippe? Why just have shoes when you could have shoes by Jimmy Choo, Brian Atwood or Stuart Weitzman? This is a group who prefer the best of the best in categories that matter to them, from clothes to oral care, restaurants to technology.
One key note here is that having money isn’t always a big factor. The Prestige group are willing to compromise in some categories in order to have what they want in categories they care about. We all know people who have gone into debt to afford a lifestyle that fits their desire for the best.
Experientials:
Everyone has a friend who is an Experiential. They like variety, colors, textures and change because, well, why not? Style matters. A lot. Engineering matters, but not nearly as much. This is not to say they don’t like quality. They do. But they are willing to compromise a little on quality if that compromise means they could have two items for about the same price, as in having both a red and yellow handbag for $X+ versus only a red handbag for $X. In doing research for a pet food brand, we found this consumer group sought variety in diet for their dogs and cats because they found it hard to believe their pets would enjoy the same thing every day. In oral care, this consumer buys a different color toothbrush and with different textures each time because she gets bored with the one she’s used for the last three months and is now ready for a new color.
Upon this foundation we build
These five groups form the essential foundation of an actionable segmentation plan almost every company or brand can build from without waiting for the million dollar study. We use them in workshops to rapidly get executives, engineers, marketers, chemists, designers, biologists and plenty of others on the same page and universally understanding that we can’t talk to everyone and certainly can’t talk to them the same way if we ever hope to connect personally.
In my next article, Making the Five Consumer Segments Work for Your Brand, I’ll break down some of the influences you can use to narrow these primal behaviors to fit your category.