✨ Step 1: How to make a Segmentation for your Brand Strategy
I recently took a course on Coursera “Brand Identity and Strategy” by IE Business School and I want to share my impressions.
Firstly I would like to say that it’s a basic course, just the beginning of brand marketing. If you already have in-depth knowledge, this course won’t be helpful to you. But for the junior-intermediate level, it helps you organize all the information and form a roadmap for your future marketing path.
To form your Brand strategy you need to complete 8 steps. I divide them into different articles, although each of them is worth the whole book.
The first step is SEGMENTATION
Brands choose the person or group of people they want to engage with and be liked by very carefully. This is the process of defining and subdividing a large homogenous market into clearly identifiable segments (groups). Well-done segmentation helps you send the right message every time, effectively targeting specific consumer groups.
who is the core consumer (target) segment your brand is positioning for? WHO needs to like us as a brand?
Segmentation is a complex process, usually there are 4 types of it:
- Demographic (age, gender, socio-economic group, location, geographic segmentation also here)
- Behavioural (what are your customers doing? how loyal are they? how often do they use your or competitor’s product?)
- Psychographic (personalities, lifestyles, attitudes)
- Motivational (why do they do what they do? why do they love what they love? why do they want what they want?)
Demographic
Demographic segmentation sorts the market by elements such as age, education, income, family size, race, gender, occupation, and nationality. Demographic is one of the simplest and most commonly used forms of segmentation. And unfortunately, many privately stop only on it.
- are they more urban or more rural? city or suburban?
- geographic location (local or regional)
- age? old or young?
Behavioural
Behavioral segmentation divides markets by behavior and decision patterns such as purchase, consumption, lifestyle, and use. For example, younger buyers may lean towards computerized cars, while older consumer groups may lean towards manual cars.
- how does your customer use and buy your Brand?
- go back — when do they use it? what benefits do they seek? what type of user are they? what point in the customer journey are they?
- do the same with buying: where and when do they buy it? How often?
Psychographic
Psychographic segmentation considers the psychological aspects of consumer behavior by dividing markets according to lifestyle, personality traits, values, opinions, and interests of consumers. When I worked in the fitness market, we used psychographic segmentation when we sorted our clients into categories of people who care about a healthy lifestyle and exercise.
Values, attitudes and lifestyles:
- delve a bit deeper into psychographics
- what type of general personality traits are behind these choices?
- do they openness to innovation? which type of brand do they like?
- compare your customer’s values and your Brand values. Can you see a pattern?
Motivational
Just start with WHY. Think really carefully why do people do things. When we see a busy person rushing to work and eating a donut, we need to dive deep and understand why he is doing this?
Segmentation brings us to an Iceberg Model. Because Demographics don’t give us enough information about our target. We have to understand their needs.
In order to show how important it is to rely not only on demographics, but also to understand the true causes of behavior, we are offered the following example. Just read this texts and guess what kind of person is your consumer.
Read and answer the question after the text. How do you imagine him?
Turns out that this person is … Cristiano Renaldo. That’s right.
You’ll never get it out of demographic statistic or even behaviour. We need to understand the motivation, the roots of our customer decisions. Poor segmentation will lead to the decreasing health of your brand.
Businesses make money when people DO things,
not when they ARE things. That’s why the demographic is not enough.
Therefore, it is worth approaching the Segmentation process very responsibly in order to be on the right track from the first steps. In the following articles, we will talk about positioning and building a brand.
