1.9
Segmentation & Targeting
Dividing a market into groups expected to behave differently, then choosing which of those groups to serve.
Wendell Smith (1956); formalised as the S and T of STP by Philip Kotler
What it does
Forces an explicit answer to who you are and are not for, and makes the trade-off visible: every segment you name is a set of buyers you have chosen to under-serve. As a planning discipline it prevents the default failure of addressing everyone with no one in mind, and it is how media is actually bought.
When it breaks
It breaks as a description of who buys. Competing brands within a category are repeatedly measured as having near-identical buyer profiles: the segments differ in size, not in kind. A segmentation that assigns each brand its own distinct demographic or attitudinal buyer is describing a market that measurement does not find. It survives as a targeting and media convenience, not as a theory of demand.
Case
Kennedy and Ehrenberg compared the buyer profiles of competing brands across a wide range of categories and found them to differ far less than segmentation practice assumes. Brands within a category are bought by much the same kinds of people, in proportion to how many buyers each brand has.
Kennedy & Ehrenberg · Brand user profiles seldom change and seldom differ ↗In the wild
Unchecked · not part of the tier
What people have written about this tool in the last twelve months. A machine found these and nobody has read them. Everything above this line was checked by hand.
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