Segmentation Exposed: Behind The Scenes of an Actual Research Project

This is one of a series of posts about a real-life attitudinal audience segmentation project.  See other posts in this series.

I’m a marketing strategist.  I’ve spent the last 25 years (gack!) learning (and then helping other organizations learn) how to get the right message to the right people in order to get those people to do something — consider, visit, tell a friend, buy, or buy again.

I have always been frustrated when faced with the challenge of developing marketing strategy without data.  Despite my liberal arts education, number-crunching is near and dear to my heart, and I have seen many organizations try to develop effective marketing campaigns with nothing but their own suppositions to go on.

So I decided to incorporate fact-based decision-making into my marketing strategy whenever possible.  And today I conduct attitudinal audience segmentation research — gaining quantitative insights into why people (or companies) make the choices they do — solely to give organizations some hard data to go on.

Of course, one of the downsides of research is that it’s proprietary.  Unlike a website development project, where the general public can see the finished product, research is information that organizations typically like to keep to themselves.  And unfortunately, this typically means I can’t show off the kind of information this segmentation research provides.

However, thanks to a willing client and co-consultants, I can now take you through a real-life audience segmentation initiative, step by step — from objectives, to survey development, to analysis and results and client presentations.  I’ll be walking through the project in a series of blog posts over the next few weeks.  I hope you find it interesting, and please let me know if you have any questions I can answer as we go along.