Face-off:  Psychographic Segmentation versus Powerful Positioning

Positioning crafted to appeal to a specific psychographic segment should out-perform a second positioning that's not aimed at that segment.  What it means when that's not the way it works.  (Or, why a quant researcher values qualitative research.)

Full disclosure:  my colleagues, bosses and I have made a fair amount of money conducting, as honestly as we can, psychographic segmentation analyses.  That is, organizing groups of people according to how they describes themselves with their ratings of their own characteristics, feelings, needs, and/or aspirations.  The stated role of most psychographic segmentation is to “understand the market,” which, as best as I can figure, ought to mean the ability to craft a positioning composed of messages that a given segment finds compelling -- disproportionately compelling compared to positionings crafted to appeal, respectively, to each of the other segments.  This is a cool research idea for those of us who'd like to understand what makes people tick, er, buy.

But I’m not the fan of psychographics that I once was.   

The main reason for this:  positioning to psychographic orientation doesn’t seem to reach the consumer as powerfully as good positioning, period.  By “good,” I mean positioning with attributes, benefits and/or claims that are important, motivating, and demonstrate superiority or better-than-expected performance.  Here’s why this is now my operating premise:

On a few occasions, and only a few, I’ve had the privilege of conducting psychographic segmentation, seeing the marketing and creative teams craft a positioning aimed at each major segment within the market, and then testing those disparate positioning concepts.  Mind you, the mutual judgment of all the professionals involved, including me, was that these truly were different positionings.  (Yes, there have been positioning concept tests when I could not honestly say this.)  In these cases, the positionings were aimed at different segments and consequently cited different benefits and claims to address the evident needs of the targeted segment.

Result?  The winning positioning was the winner across all segments; the loser likewise lost against all segments.

Checkpoint:  Each time, I thought we had gotten something wrong in the research.  The different segments are supposed to be different; so the different positionings should test differently.  And by a nudge here and a tick there, they did -- but not enough to change the overall rank order (except in the “muddled middle” tier).

So I’ve asked around, since, as a supplier, I don’t often get asked to test against segments I’ve created.  To the extent that researchers ventured an opinion, they affirmed that my experiences were not unique.  A powerful positioning will trump a “segment-specific” positioning even in the intended segment.  I’m not insisting you to believe me, because this is not a serious review of studies, but it doesn’t hurt to consider the implications. 

Implications:  If you think I’m wrong, I’d love to work with you to test out your hypothesis, because it still bothers me to have come to this untidy conclusion.  But until you prove me wrong, here's where I'm at.  When I’m next in charge of a Consumer Insights department, this is my guidance for the Teams:

Stimulant:  Psychographic segmentation is often more useful in its ability to stimulate creative thinking by marketing and creative teams than in its predictive ability.  Just being forced to craft or edit the psychographic statements helps team members come to grips with an understanding of their consumers.  Then the presentation and ideation around study results can lead to wonderful concept creation.  Teams might not have the breadth of concept positionings that they should without pondering the meaning inherent in each segment.  So there are reasons to conduct psychographic segmentation having little to do with predictive power in the segments.

Measurement:  Psychographic segmentation, and the relative size of segments, are not a substitute for testing potential messages.  Key to crafting a successful positioning is understanding how messages perform on importance, motivation and their ability to evoke perceptions of uniquely qualified performance.  (Some people will tell you that you don’t need to measure stated importance any more.  They’re often wrong, but that’s another article.)  If you only have the resources to take one path, focus on the messages, not the segments.  (If this interests you, you might want to know about BETTY analysis or follow the Learn More link at Towerpoints.)

Resource Management:  The process of a segmentation study stimulates useful team creativity and consideration.  But so will good online community investigations, focus groups and ethnography,  often at greater speed and less overall expense.  If you only have the resources to take one path, focus on the messages, not the segments.

So the next time you have more projects to do than resources to fund them...(what’s that, you say?  “Next time” is today?)  Consider replacing costly, lengthy psychographic segmentation with a creative-stimulus mix of qualitative research, followed by an aggressive investigation of the individual messages that emerge as a result.  Do this before trying to form any positioning concepts.  I think you have a better chance of getting where you’ll need to go, faster and more economically.