5 Ways to kill a segmentation before it starts

Segmentation can be one of the most useful tools a business has for making choices about where to focus for growth. It can shape who you target, where you innovate, how you build your proposition and where you put your investment.

It can also become an expensive piece of research that people vaguely remember from a launch presentation six months ago.

The difference isn’t always down to the quality of the segmentation itself. Some of the biggest problems happen around it: how the project is set up, who is involved, how long it takes and what happens once the work is finished.

So, if you want to give your segmentation the best possible chance of making a difference, here are five traps to avoid.

1. Treat it as a marketing exercise

Marketing might commission the segmentation, but it shouldn’t own the output alone.

People naturally group customers in different ways depending on the decisions they need to make. Leave every function to its own devices and the product team develops one view of the customer, sales another, marketing another and innovation another. Before long, the organisation has several competing versions of who matters and why.

For an audience segmentation to become genuinely useful (and impactful), it needs relevance beyond the marketing team. That means involving the right functions early, creating a cross-functional steering group and ideally having an executive sponsor who can help turn the work into a shared business framework.

If segmentation is going to influence where the business focuses, the people making those choices need to have a stake in it from the start.

2. Expect one segmentation to answer every question

There’s an important distinction between having multiple competing audience segmentations and using different types of segmentation (audience / occasions / needs) to answer genuinely different questions.

Your core audience segmentation might help you understand who you are for and why. But an innovation team looking at the future of a category may need to understand different needs, occasions or emerging sources of demand.

Trying to force all of that into one segmentation can make the original framework less useful, rather than more.

We often use deliberately different language here to avoid confusion. An audience segmentation can sit alongside a needs-based demand framework or demand clusters (segmentation of demands), for example. The important thing is that everyone understands which framework answers which question, and when each should be used.

A business can comfortably work with both. It just requires clarity about their different jobs.

3. Let the perfect answer arrive too late

Segmentation needs rigour. It also needs to arrive while the business still cares.

Historically, segmentation programmes have had a reputation for taking a long time. There are good reasons for some of that complexity, but the perfect analytical answer isn’t much use if the board meeting, annual planning cycle or innovation decision it was supposed to inform happened three months ago.

Before starting, understand the business decisions the segmentation needs to influence and work backwards from them. Put the important milestones and delivery deadlines into the programme from day one.

New tools and smarter research workflows, combined with TVE’s investment in accelerating delivery, mean that speed and rigour no longer need to be opposing forces. A segmentation can move quickly without becoming superficial.

Momentum matters. Once you lose it, rebuilding attention and enthusiasm across an organisation is difficult.

4. Assume segmentation requires a huge budget

Segmentation doesn’t automatically have to mean a vast research programme with a vast price tag attached.

At its heart, segmentation is about dividing people into groups that are meaningful enough to help you make better decisions. What counts as meaningful depends on your business, the question you are trying to answer and the level of evidence your stakeholders need to feel confident acting on it.

Sometimes that demands a significant programme. Sometimes a quicker, more focused approach will give the organisation exactly what it needs.

Starting with the business decision, rather than a predetermined methodology, allows you to design the right level of segmentation for the job.

5. Forget the boring bits

You’ve launched the segmentation. There was a great presentation. Everyone watched the segment films. The personas have names. Job done?

Unfortunately, this is often where the real work starts.

One of the quickest ways to make a segmentation disappear is to assume that because the work is good, people will naturally use it.

Embedding happens through the less glamorous machinery of the organisation. If a team is writing an NPD business case, where does the segmentation appear? If someone is briefing the creative agency, have they identified the relevant audience? Is it reflected in the CRM database, and the KPIs attached? In the templates and processes people use every week?

These details can have far more impact on adoption than another internal launch event.

If you want a segmentation to change the organisation, put it into the fabric of how the organisation actually runs.

Segmentation should help a business choose

The common thread through all five is that segmentation shouldn’t exist as an isolated research or marketing exercise.

Its purpose is to help an organisation make better choices: about the people it serves, the opportunities it pursues and ultimately where to focus for growth.

That means thinking about the decisions, stakeholders, timing and application of a segmentation before you start worrying about the perfect set of segments.

Because a technically brilliant segmentation that nobody uses isn’t particularly brilliant at all.