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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.

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