Every company deserves good data. Ever since I started doing audience segmentation research, I’ve been trying to find a way to make it more easily accessible for smaller organizations. Research of this kind often costs $60,000 or more. While our fee for a fully customized research project is much lower (typically between $20,000 and $30,000), even these rates put quality segmentation research out of reach for many companies. Every agency I’ve ever worked with has asked for a segmentation option that will work within smaller budgets.

Our challenge has always been to figure out how to offer a lower-fee option without compromising the quality of our research design, the exacting statistical standards of our analytics, or the statistically reliable nature of our work. In short, we won’t do crappy research.

Finally, I’ve cracked the code and am very proud to announce two new Audience Audit segmentation options, in addition to our flagship full-custom approach. These products provide customized, quantitative, statistically reliable attitudinal segmentation for as little as $5,000.

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Often I’m asked if attitudinal audience segmentation can benefit B-to-B companies as well.  While B-to-B projects carry some unique challenges compared to B-to-C initiatives — finding enough respondents can be tricky, and often they can’t be incented to provide their feedback, for example —  I’ve conducted some fascinating B-to-B projects.

As an example I can offer this case study of a B-to-B audience segmentation initiative I conducted for the Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce (shared with permission).  Enjoy!

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I’m a big fan of “The Good Wife” and the other day was watching a episode in which a key character was discussing his political campaign with his campaign manager and pollster.  In an attempt to increase his youth support, the team decides to utilize the candidate’s previous jail term to appeal to this market.  The candidate is concerned that the message will turn off more conservative voters, but the pollster reassures him that it can be handled through online and social media and won’t even be seen by the other groups.  It is, in his words, “a dog whistle”, only heard by those for whom it’s intended.

Because I do audience segmentation research, I see lots of situations in which the “dog whistle” approach is the right one for a particular message and a particular audience.  One audience loves spicy food — another hates it — but both love your Mexican restaurant.  Once audience is very religious — another just wants a good education close to home — but both are considering your faith-based college.  In many of these cases, trying to be “all things to all people” only serves to make some audiences sure that you’re not for them.  Why risk it when technologies such as email segmentation and social media allow us to target our messages with such specificity?

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