Using behavioral insights to better segment customers
This week, we’re launching a new guidebook series at Valize, designed to share core ideas about strategy today in a convenient online format for using with your team or on your own. The first one has to do with customer behavior and the all-important understanding of how traditional segmentation lets us down. Here’s a little taste.
Traditional ways of segmenting customers — easy to do, compellingly quantifiable, and often strategically useless.
We’ve all been taught, and subjected to as consumers, that the most important things to know about customers are their demographics. How old are they? Where do they live? How much money have they got? Well, as we’ve learned from the relentless tracking of our search and other habits, advertisers and marketers are now learning that understanding behavior trumps understanding such characteristics.
As Shoshana Zuboff points out in her book Surveillance Capitalism, it’s “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” As she points out, very few people would knowingly agree to give up so much personal information for the benefit of for-profit organizations that monetize it through advertisements.
