B1BLOG

There are many, many cus­tomer seg­ment­a­tions in the world of mar­ket­ing. Typ­ic­ally, these involve a chunk of research to determ­ine a set of buyer arche­types. These are often then given names such as ‘big man on cam­pus’, ‘har­assed MD’ and ‘digital refusenik’.

As an approach, they can be pretty help­ful. They provide a short­hand way of look­ing at an audi­ence – one which enables us to form more tar­geted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The prob­lem, how­ever, is that typ­ic­ally they are simply made up.

That’s unfair of course. These seg­ments rep­res­ent por­traits of group­ings of char­ac­ter­ist­ics as seen by the research­ers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I’m mak­ing is that exactly what these group­ings are is fun­da­ment­ally down to the sub­ject­ive view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ulti­mate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do bet­ter. I’d been on some lead­er­ship train­ing course and taken a test to determ­ine my Myers-Briggs per­son­al­ity. I found what it told me to be both accur­ate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it’s been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essen­tially it breaks the world down into 16 per­son­al­ity types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The indi­vidual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I’m Intro­ver­ted, iNtu­it­ive, Think­ing and Per­ceiv­ing. I won’t go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred’s of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years mil­lions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evid­ence about what makes an indi­vidual per­son­al­ity type tick. I began won­der­ing whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typ­ing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an exper­i­ment. At Ban­ner, we cre­ated a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be com­pleted in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same res­ults as other tests. And then we invited IT pro­fes­sion­als in the US, UK, France and Ger­many to have a go. Every­one who com­pleted the sur­vey got a copy of their res­ults and a little bit of ana­lysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the res­ults were rather remarkable:

Focus­ing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accoun­ted for 40% of the IT pro­fes­sion­als we sur­veyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Archi­tects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then com­pared Europe to the US – aston­ish­ingly the top per­son­al­ity type in Europe accoun­ted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Ger­many were almost polar opposites.

A present­a­tion of the top-line res­ults is embed­ded below. You can down­load it from Slideshare.

The good and the bad

So is this really the pan­acea for seg­ment­a­tion? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in spe­cial­ised job roles. As soon as it is exten­ded to more gen­eral busi­ness roles (eg gen­eral man­age­ment) the indi­vidual per­son­al­ity spikes van­ish and the dis­tri­bu­tion returns to that of the gen­eral population.

There are those who are not con­vinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to per­son­al­ity – Google ‘Cri­ti­cisms of Myers-Briggs’ for a pretty com­pre­hens­ive list. There are a whole bunch of other com­pet­ing systems.

But, as a pos­sible approach it at least removes some of the sub­jectiv­ity from seg­ment­a­tion. The pro­files we built up (by review­ing every piece of lit­er­at­ure on the sub­ject) gave us over 60 dif­fer­ent per­son­al­ity attrib­utes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be com­mu­nic­ated with through to what kind of par­ents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.

Money is tight. Budgets are squeezed. You simply don’t have the resources to do everything. It’s decision time: do you spend what you have on grow­ing the brand or on gen­er­at­ing demand and hit­ting the num­bers? If you are like two-thirds of the attendees at one recent B2B event, you’ll have chosen brand. If on the other hand you are in the grip of the bean coun­ters, you’ll have opted for demand.

But here’s the rub: whichever you chose, you chose wrong.

In the land of the blind

After all these years, it still amazes me that so many in the industry think in these kinds of bin­ary terms. Brand or demand. Stra­tegic or tac­tical. Even mar­ket­ing or sales. It’s a recipe for death by silo.

The truth of course, is that the decision is never bin­ary. Every piece of demand activ­ity you pro­duce is an embod­i­ment of your brand. Like­wise every brand com­mu­nic­a­tion should drive demand.

To focus on demand gen­er­a­tion for a moment – there is a tend­ency in the industry to think purely in terms of the num­bers. How many clicks/downloads/sales/whatevers did this com­mu­nic­a­tion achieve? It often leads to a nail the prob­lem, ham­mer the offer, for­get the brand approach (well, we did fol­low the guidelines). And you know what? It works. To a degree at least.

The prob­lem is that this tends to focus so heav­ily on what we do it leaves no room for how we do it. The end oblit­er­ates the means.

Demand meet brand, brand meet demand

As soon as we focus on how we gen­er­ate demand and what it means for the brand, some­thing inter­est­ing happens.

For one thing, the cus­tomer comes more sharply into focus. We think more about how we can help them deal with the prob­lems they face and less about simply what car­rot we can dangle to get them to do stuff.

We also take a longer term view. Not of the res­ults – we still need to hit the num­bers. But we begin to con­sider the leg­acy of what we cre­ate. What effect will it have on our repu­ta­tion? What will the recip­i­ents say to friends and col­leagues about us? What will they think, the next time they see some­thing from us?

And, while I’ve focused on demand gen­er­a­tion here, the bene­fits also extend the other way. By mak­ing more brand-focused com­mu­nic­a­tion respons­ible for grow­ing demand as well as brand, we give it focus. We avoid the upward creep that ends with brands try­ing to cap­ture lofty ideals that are irrel­ev­ant to the con­text their cus­tom­ers find them­selves in (the world peace syndrome).

The res­ult will be a stronger brand, greater demand and increased loy­alty. Now doesn’t that sound like a good decision?

Land­ing pages would seem to be a fairly tedi­ous topic of con­ver­sa­tion; how­ever they can often make or break cam­paigns. And all too often, it’s the lat­ter. Many cli­ents have sep­ar­ated mar­ket­ing and web teams, leav­ing the IT-driven web team to pro­duce the land­ing page. This can cause issues with the link­age between the cre­at­ive and land­ing page con­tent, less than ideal land­ing page struc­tures with call-to-actions hid­den below the fold and nav­ig­a­tion bars divert­ing the users from the key action com­pan­ies want them to take. Altern­at­ively, it could be that the cli­ent has out­sourced their land­ing page con­struc­tion to an external agency that like to build pretty Flash-driven sites that are a night­mare from an SEO per­spect­ive and addi­tion­ally, external host­ing exposes the site to poten­tial secur­ity attacks. It seems that due to the rel­at­ively short shelf-life of cam­paigns and thus cam­paign land­ing pages, the think­ing and atten­tion needed is not being given to the primary way of con­vert­ing poten­tial customers.

Changes are afoot though, driven by social media. Coke has announced that they will stop cre­at­ing cam­paign sites in favour of driv­ing people to their social media com­munit­ies on Face­book and You­Tube instead.

Uni­lever is fol­low­ing suit and the likes of T-mobile with their Life’s for Shar­ing cam­paign last year were already driv­ing people to their You­Tube com­munity as the main call-to-action. And the social media sites are gear­ing up towards the trend: the latest news from Face­book is an Omni­ture part­ner­ship to provide (among oth­ers) cor­por­ate Face­book com­munit­ies the web ana­lyt­ics expec­ted before for cam­paign sites. Why the change? Well, mar­keters have had enough of cre­at­ing dis­pos­able cam­paign sites (which I whole­heartedly agree with) that are dumped after the com­pany has moved to the next quarter or the next big push they are focus­ing on. Secondly they want to drive people to exist­ing com­munit­ies where their audi­ence is already, in a mind­set ready to share and engage. I get that too, how­ever am in a quandary about driv­ing the organic rank­ings of social com­munity site as opposed to the client’s own site. In my mind, only brands that are of cer­tain size and don’t neces­sar­ily sell online would want to do that.

We are test­ing a best of both worlds approach instead with one of our cli­ents (cam­paign due to launch in a couple of months, will keep you updated on the pro­gress!): instead of the usual cor­por­ate land­ing page, we are cre­at­ing a socially super­charged aggreg­ator site. The site com­bines cli­ent and user cre­ated social con­tent from You­Tube, Face­book, Slide­share, Scribd etc with the client’s cor­por­ate con­tent (trial down­load offers, reviews, webinars and tutori­als). This way, the exper­i­ence for the user com­ing to the site is much more valu­able, the social back-links are build­ing the SEO rank­ings for the cli­ent, not for social sites and hope­fully, with the improved exper­i­ence, the con­ver­sion rates are improved as well. I believe the future of cam­paign sites is social and that long-term, “green” think­ing needs to be integ­rated into marketing.