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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.

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?

Ever since we held the last (and first) European Demand Gen­er­a­tion Sum­mit at Alti­tude last Novem­ber, we’ve had a thirst to do it all over again.

As part of the feed­back pro­cess on the last event, we asked what people thought of the day, the con­tent and speak­ers. We also asked what changes they’d like to see in the format of the event in the future and what top­ics they’d like to see covered.

Per­haps pre­dict­ably, it was the day’s agenda and cal­ibre of the speaker line-up that attrac­ted most people to the first event. Not to men­tion it was free to our invit­ees. Of course our speak­ers scored very highly, but com­ing away from the day almost all com­men­ted on how much they’d val­ued the oppor­tun­ity to net­work. I’m sure they found it cath­artic to share some pain and under­stand that oth­ers out there were try­ing to over­come the same hurdles.

Three key pieces of feed­back came through, which we’ve tried to listen to in put­ting together the agenda for the forth­com­ing summit:

1. People want more prac­tical con­tent and less of the the­or­et­ical. There’s an appet­ite for stor­ies of blood­ied knuckles, as well as a hun­ger for real learn­ings from people who’ve been there and done it. We were very con­scious not to make last year’s event a beauty parade of vendors and ensure it was client-side mar­keters telling their stor­ies. This time round we’re try­ing to encour­age our speak­ers to tell their suc­cess stor­ies, and what mis­takes they’d avoid the second time round. As an example, Shawn Burns from SAP is com­ing along to tell the story of how he and other mar­keters trans­formed sap.com from a largely bro­chure­ware site to a ‘demand gen­er­a­tion machine’. Good stuff.

2. Attendees wanted more oppor­tun­ity to net­work and learn from their peers. We had some great table con­ver­sa­tions at lunch­time last time round, and we tried to allow gen­er­ous breaks. For the most part people res­isted the lure of their Black­Ber­ries, made con­ver­sa­tion and benefited immensely. This time round we’ve gone a bit fur­ther and we’ve made the after­noon ses­sions entirely inter­act­ive. Attendees will have the oppor­tun­ity to attend three out of four work­shops on social media, accel­er­at­ing sales, using web­cast­ing and online video, and meas­ur­ing and optim­ising cam­paigns. We’re going to have people cap­tur­ing learn­ings from one group to another so that through the course of the after­noon we gen­er­ate a body of know­ledge which can then be shared with all attendees afterwards.

3. In terms of the con­tent, there was a lot of call for tips on mak­ing the most of a credit-crunched budget, using social media and prov­ing a return on mar­ket­ing activ­ity. Our first speaker of the day, Jim Cas­sidy, is an ex IBM mar­keter now at European com­pany Step­Stone. In his pre­vi­ous life with a budget of mil­lions, his greatest chal­lenge used to be how to spend mar­ket­ing budget fast enough. He’s now in a pos­i­tion where every penny (cent) has to be accoun­ted for. Jim will talk about what he’s pri­or­it­ising, how he’s mak­ing a case for spend with the board, and how he’s mak­ing his mar­ket­ing assets sweat. We’ve also got a great panel line up, led by Cisco’s Amanda Job­bins. They’re going to give their take on some of these topics.

So hope­fully that gives you some­thing of a taster for what’s to come on the 30^th April. If you need any more encour­age­ment, the venue we’ve chosen this time is simply stun­ning — a private member’s club at the top of Centrepoint.

About time you registered I think: www.demandgenerationsummit.com

Remem­ber, we’re only accept­ing regis­tra­tions from client-side mar­keters from the B2B ser­vices, tech­no­logy and tele­coms sec­tors. No offence inten­ded to oth­ers, but demand for places is extremely high.

Hope­fully see you there.

P.S. If you’re of the twit­ter­ing kind, you can get reg­u­lar updates by fol­low­ing us at www.twitter.com/demandgentweet or sub­scrib­ing to the RSS feed

So I spent yes­ter­day at this year’s Insti­tute of Dir­ect Mar­ket­ing Business-to-Business Con­fer­ence. I rarely get to con­fer­ences. Even the ones I book on always seem to fall on days where ‘stuff hap­pens’ and I become another no-show. But yes­ter­day, I actu­ally made it.

And wished I hadn’t.

The only reason I will go to events like these is to learn stuff. I’m not inter­ested in the net­work­ing (prob­ably because I’m rub­bish at it) and catered food only holds so much appeal. It’s all about new think­ing that chal­lenges the mind and expands my understanding.

Apart from the odd men­tion of blogs and a good over­view of search mar­ket­ing (presen­ted really well by Chris War­wick of Hoover’s) this could have been a con­fer­ence in 1997 rather than 2007. We were told of the need to under­stand busi­ness cus­tom­ers as people. How mar­ket­ing and sales really should get on bet­ter. And given an insight into how a cam­paign can pro­gress from “frankly we don’t know what we’re doing” to “for the most part, we do know what we’re doing.”

I then joined the “mar­ket­ing to cor­por­ates” stream that con­scien­tiously avoided any men­tion what­so­ever of how to mar­ket to cor­por­ates. Soon after, I lost the will to live.

Business-to-business has always been FMCG’s ugly sis­ter. But the chal­lenges and oppor­tun­it­ies within B2B/considered pur­chase are (IMHO) far more inter­est­ing than FMCG. The com­plex­ity of the sales. The need to really engage with the mar­ket over a long period. The chance to part­ner with cus­tom­ers. All offer massive scope for innov­at­ive think­ing and fresh approaches.

If what I saw yes­ter­day is rep­res­ent­at­ive of where most of the industry is at, we should all be very afraid.