Bridging the holes in your data by changing business values
Super detailed data relating to individuals’ behaviour and how they act online has been available to brand owners for more than a decade. This means that we’ve technically been able to segment customers by what they do, say, how they act and react for quite some time. However, it’s only now the opportunities are being grasped.
If marketers fail to combine customers’ behavioral and online data with external sources such as lifestyle and demographic data, then this is also likely to mean they will fail to segment customers optimally.
The ‘behaviour gap’, as we have termed it, has not been created by an incompetence to handle the ever increasing amount of data available. Quite the opposite. As computers and technology have become more adept at handling data, granularity has increased exponentially. Twenty years ago, marketers would group customers into say ten segments. However, today this can be divided into hundreds of segments.
The biggest breakthrough in customer segmentation has not come from technology
The biggest breakthrough in customer segmentation hasn’t come from our ability to pull the behavioural and lifestyle data together. The most significant breakthrough has come from putting data at the centre of business activity, not confining it to the marketing department.
Brands and marketers need to focus their energy on investing in data strategies with expectations of returns beyond the tenure of the current marketing director. For many organisations, that involves a significant change in both practice and culture.
“The real returns will always be delivered in a timescale beyond the tenure of your current marketing director”
This longer view for data strategy gives brand owners a new opportunity to understand the real lifetime value of their customers. And the better they understand this, the more valuable multi-channel CRM programmes can be.
Marketers need to place priority on investing in solutions and practices that enable them to understand each and every customer in as much detail as possible. These solutions and expert providers of such approaches are readily available, but successful implementation requires a committed approach to breaking down the barriers between traditionally separated areas of consumer insight such as, behavioural, aspirational and transactional data. To achieve this effectively requires both data and marketing expertise that ensures each set is combined to produce highly individualised consumer insight optimised specifically for various channels.
Such an outcome requires placing living, breathing people at the centre of your marketing strategy rather than numbers. On a macro scale it always helps to give each broad segment a name to give the organisation an understanding of the customer, but communicating the consumer’s personality and values is key.
Choosing the right name and photograph to represent a segment is therefore really beneficial. The less open to interpretation the segments are, the easier it is for people in different parts of the business to share an understanding of the customer. For example, it’s easy to see that Hermione and Sharon are worlds apart but how different are Helen and Claire?
But portraying consumers accurately in this way requires bridging the behaviour gap with data from brand owned websites and social media so that we can finally start to deliver on the audience of one. Only by investing in solutions to achieve this level of individualisation will we be able to create and deliver the niche products, services and marketing activity that meet the demands of today’s consumer.
Failing to adapt will create insurmountable problems
As long as the behaviour gap exists, brands will continue to be forced to base strategy on traditional single perspective stroke segmentations drawn from a world that’s long since changed. What was sufficient for a time with significantly less communication channels and customer choice isn‘t going to cut it for much longer. And the problems for a brand that falls through the behaviour gap could soon be insurmountable.
