Sam Birkett
Hello everyone! Welcome once again to Marketing Meanders with Sally and Sam, and today, I mean, I've thrown a bit of a curveball at Sally, because we've changed what we're going to talk about at the last minute. But I think it's something that's hopefully very relevant to all marketers actually and it's about, I don't know, you could describe this in different ways, whether it's personalisation, micro-segmentation, granular-segmentation, how we can move from having segments of our audience and messages to those segments, creatives, content, user-journeys, the full-works to have always a benefit to the individual and whether this is sort of like the ultimate state where we want to get to. I'm always referring to Minority Report, the film, which came out a number of years ago, where, you know, adverts in the streets just scanned your eyeball and knew who you were and had a perfect advert tailored just to you. So obviously, we've got a whole load of, you know, things about data, and privacy, and everything to think about in terms of that, but just taking a step back towards, I was interested in this from the side of point of view of... as a small marketing team, or as an individual marketer or business owner. How do you move from having a universal sort of message and segment, I guess, to you maybe quite clear on, we're after 40-year-old men who own small dogs. It's a very strange one, but anyway,

Sally Green
In Gloucestershire.

Sam Birkett
In Gloucestershire. We've done that and then we, you know, the business grows and we actually go either, I mean, we'll come to international segmentation, but go into other areas. So we may have different personas, but how do we actually move if we don't have many resources? How do you move towards a greater level of personalisation and micro-segmentation? Over to you Sally, what a question!

Sally Green
I'll just quickly answer that. I think it's about, it's really understanding who your audience is. The absolute baseline of this, you can't segment your audience unless you disassemble, you know, understand who they are, and what they're doing and make some confident assumptions about how they behave. So what is their decision-making process? So to buy your product, it depends on the product, is it only their decision or do they have to ask 12 other people? Is it something they're buying for somebody else, or they're buying for themselves? There's so much you kind of need to know, at the very baseline, before you can even decide, you know, yes, I'm going to do this special one for people with red hair, or this special one that have got small dogs, but want to buy a labrador, because you can do it, you know, absolutely, you can segment magnificently, but not if you don't know what you're doing. If you don't know who you've got already. So to a certain extent, it might be worth asking your customers who they are. So you know, put out polls out there, do polls on LinkedIn, do polls to your email contacts and say, are you interested in x, y, z, and so you then actually ask them to segment themselves, so part of the work they've done for you. So if you can get that to, you could do it in a spreadsheet. But if you've got a clever CRM, it's putting nice new tags into your CRM, so you can then start sending them specialist messages for red-haired dog owners. I can't quite see what that would be, but all the say, I'm sure that I'm sure they're out there, I'm absolutely sure they're out there and then you might find, but they then must recognise that some of this segmentation is going to have absolutely no difference. Don't over-egg puddings. So don't keep you know, go because you know there is a group of them, they might not care, or they might think you're being a bit racist by pointing out their red-hairedness constantly, this is a bit rude. I've told you, but I don't want you to go on and on about it. So you've got to make sure that segmenting is going to be beneficial and it's going to make a difference to your product sale.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, I think you made a really important point there which is interesting between the sort of why do further segmentation? Is there... because we talk about data as clearly the key to all of this, the data to understand and to provide insights customer insights into why you would segment to a greater extent and then moving towards okay, and then the whole thing as I said before, but then the data privacy, how much data can you gain on these people to understand that sort of level of micro-granularity? But then starting with that, the why and moving towards how I suppose so if you understand to begin with that, yes, it's really important that we have tones of dog collars and leads which work well, if someone's very fashion conscious and a redhead, for example, that is actually something that we're picking up on, from customer service, from feedback on social media, from wherever you know, or maybe just the general idea that people want to colour coordinate their hair with their kit. Could be a good thing. But then that's the thing is that I suppose then it's that looking at these opportunities you have available and then saying, well, it looks like there is an opportunity here, you know, for product innovation and or for, you know, altering our messages at a certain level, to these people. Because that's the other thing is that because it's the complexity about having more the universal message about you know, the brand and the brand identity, brand values, and then when it moves more towards the individual customer journeys or segmented journeys, then it's like, we segment and we go more and find at this point, I'm trying to do as my hands obviously, which you won't see, but at the top level, the second level, I'm still doing weird dangling with my finger, like mobile runs. Then secondary and tertiary levels, I suppose. So it is that thing isn't it as well about understanding where that makes a difference, because it could be more to do with maybe the customer lifetime value and the relationship you establish with them, rather than the initial sell, just trying to add another layer of complexity on this. But I think that's true, isn't it really.

Sally Green
That's completely true. But I think you have to understand that levelling, I think you have to be really careful that it goes through all of your business, because it's all very well, being able to do beautifully segmented email campaigns. That's all very lovely off the go. But then if the landing page is just going back to your homepage on your website, and they lose any kind of concepts that 'click here, if you've got red hair', or 'follow the colour coordination pathway this way', if you don't have that on your website, if this segmentation doesn't happen on your website, then what exactly is the point? If you haven't replicated that there's this specialist customer journey on your website, then you may as well not have bothered segmenting anybody. If you know if I've said Oh, yes, I'm particularly interested in having Christmas, I dye my hair purple every Christmas, I absolutely want to have a purple coat for my dog to go with it and then I just land on the homepage. What do I have to do the searching as a customer? Do I have to now search for purple coats or what? That's not adequate. You've got to get deeper into your marketing campaigns, and spend more time effort and energy on having different landing pages on your website.

Sam Birkett
You make a crucial point there. I think that really isn't that and you say is that stacking everything up? So that yes, we're not communicating at that segmental level, the marketing team, and again, comes back to one thing about marketing, talking to other teams, other teams talking to marketing. So it could be the other way around that there's new innovation and people in the product, I say product innovation team or whatever, you know, develop something and the sales guys go out and say, yeah, we're now doing, you know, we're creating these products and you go, Oh, hang on a minute, we had no idea that we were, you know, we had this level of products. So it could be vice versa, couldn't it? But I suppose if we take the first scenario, perhaps where you know, marketing has gone, yes, so now we have all this granularity of your customer journey here. It's marvellous! But then everyone else goes, well, we're not lined up to do that, or perhaps one person, the marketing team, or one level of the marketing team said we could do this email, guys. So we can do it and as you say the website guys go, Well, no, we haven't got you know, we can't create that many pages. That's ridiculous. We haven't got time or we perhaps need a totally different system, or a bolt onto it to actually allow us to even have that and so like, well, you know, we may have that customer insight data here. But we don't store that and connect it to the websites to enable us to then change the website. So all those considerations have to go into that the beginning, don't they?

Sally Green
You're absolutely right. It's your website, your CRM, and probably your customer service people, you've got to absolutely make sure that the people that are going to be answering the phone to these people that have received this very specialist email saying, we can actually get your hair colour, send your dye, and we will match your dog coat to it. You've got to make sure that the people on the phone are able to answer the phone properly and go, yes, of course we can. Let me see. I'll just point, I'll just... you know, they're not just sitting there going, 'You what? Ay?' because they don't know anything about it. So I think, what you've said about communication, cross-silo communication. The more you segment, the more important it is.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, and I think all this sort of leads towards the whole big question about is this worthwhile? So is there something that we've discovered in our ongoing market research, which is updating personas, etc, and our segments to say, Yes, this is important and I'm thinking probably, it's more, it can be something that comes up more when we look at maybe the cross sell or the upsell to existing customers, perhaps rather than...

Sally Green
I think you're right.

Sam Birkett
I mean, it could be we're going after a new segment, you know, we know that this stuff has gone down really well in Gloucestershire, and now we really want to go for others

Sally Green
Worcestershire.

Sam Birkett
Worcestershire or Midlothian or something and we want we're gonna we're going to Scotland with this and you think well, what they're for if we are entering a different market or perhaps you know, your organisation has bought somebody or is in a new partnership or something and you're going oh Crikey. Okay, well now we need to... we've had a business decision, a strategic decision, force us to now rethink, you know, do we have the infrastructure to actually service these new segments? And what's the difference? Is there a meaningful difference that makes a difference between your existing personas and new ones? Existing segments and new ones?

Sally Green
Yeah, absolutely, you made a really good point about data, because you'll write it all depends on the data. We've got to keep analysing the data and make sure we're listening and seeing what people are doing. But at the same point, some of that data needs, you have to be quite critical of yourself. So if you've done this marvellous, you've segmented like mad, and you're doing an email campaign, and it's going to four people and that's very marvellously segmented, don't just say it's this segment, off we go. How many people is it going to? How many of them answered? Is this worthwhile? You've got to do some really kind of quite key analytics here. Because it just might not be worth one, you've got to be really honest, that didn't work, did it? The more you try and segment your lists, the more likely it is you're going to have an increasing number of them not really working.

Sam Birkett
Yeah. Well, that's the thing and this, this whole theme actually goes absolutely into demonstrates the tactical, operational, strategic side of things. So the whole, yes, we're going to have a different segment or new products coming out and then it's like, okay, operationally, how do we support that? And tactically, yes, we can do these best just to this group of four people. But then looking at the data internally and saying, well, what's the return on investment on that? So we're going to increase their customer lifetime value by 200% and we're going to retain them for an extra five years. Great. So let's map that out. So if that's like, well, that equates to £500, and you go, okay, and you're spending how much on this new email soft system, which specifically is enabling this? Oh, it's £20,000. Right. Okay, so where else are we using this?

Hang on a moment!

There's something that isn't right here, isn't it? But it's all of those operational resource questions, and then inform strategy and say, Okay, now, we may need a decision between this is a good idea and this is a good idea. But this is a better idea with how we can move forward as a business and this is driving growth, rather than this great new segmentation thing, which is nice. But here's the stats, here's our predictions. So it really goes up, right up and down the chain, doesn't it I suppose in those conversations.

Sally Green
Completely. I mean, segmentation is really important that you get it right and you should be thinking about it, when you're doing your customer persona, at the very, very beginning, you have to have more than one, you have to have multiple personas at the very beginning and those will grow depending on what your audience actually looks like in real life. But at the same time, if I go into businesses, and I see multiple tiny segments, or even quite large segments done, but lots of these email campaigns or specific campaigns for specific personas going on all the time, a little bit of me thinks you're kind of over-egging the pudding here, and really, what is the actual difference between this segment and this segment? Are they actually basically the same? And you might have more weight in saying, rather than saying, Oh, you're one of four that go want to buy this, don't you feel special, it might be better to say to people, you're one of 50,000 that want to buy this, as you know, safety in crowds. So you've got to make sure that yes, you want people to feel unique, and I got you guys got a personal relationship with your product. But maybe it might be good to say to them, loads of people are doing what you do. Isn't that terrific? You've all chosen the right direction. So it's really difficult. You don't just segment because you can.

Sam Birkett
Well, that's the thing. I think this is a really interesting example of how you the interface between technology and sort of the human planning mind, the manager's mind between? Well, we can do this. So perhaps you do have a fantastic piece of software, a great CRM that's integrated all your marketing, and it's like, yeah, look at it was amazing stuff we can do. Do you have the time to do that? Is there a need, as you say, to do that at all? And then it's also I suppose, looking at, well, I guess it's really just understanding its customer journeys again, isn't it saying, Well, what are the outcomes? What are the important brand values that this segment identifies with them? How do we need to differentiate how we get the point across. In simplistic ways, I suppose you could say, well, even on a personal basis as like, well, your personal brand, how you clearly behave a bit different if you go out for lunch with your grandmother, then you're going to behave differently to if you go down the pub with your mates, for example, aren't you because you have two different audiences that with different needs, they want to interact with you on a different level is the same person, you do have that difference and then it's sort of like well, but do I need to behave radically differently from you know, one mate down the pub as opposed to another? Probably based more on my relationship with them of course, if you talk about it that way, obviously, if one of them's like, I don't know just got a new job and it's top the world's very happy I'm going to speak differently to the guy who's just lost his job and broken up with his girlfriend or something and it's there's those children, perhaps not the best example in the world, but it is that sort of, I suppose, the outcomes.

Sally Green
Yeah, the outcome, that's exactly right. I mean, I'm segmenting all sorts of talk, if you're desperately trying to find a new segment to cram your brand into, it might be that your brand isn't fitting with that bit of your audience, it just might be that your business, it might be a time to step back and go, perhaps we need to look at this more carefully. Because actually, maybe they need more than one brand here. So Coca-Cola wants just did Coca-Cola, and everyone drank Coca-Cola. And then they probably did a bit of segmenting and found that people were worried about the diet or the worried about their health or whatever, they were segmented a bit, and then they thought, let's make Diet Coke. So they just did a bit of a rebrand and that was probably because they thought they'd started segmenting their audience base and it might be that you need to do bigger things. It's not just about shoving the same product into a smaller space. It's about changing the product content or product concept for that segment. So you might have to change the product for the segment rather than to make the segment understand the product.

Sam Birkett
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you just mentioned Coca-Cola, because it just reminded me of something I saw the other day, which I hadn't actually seen before. Some green Coca-Cola

Sally Green
Sounds revolting!

Sam Birkett
Yeah, yeah. Green cola.

Sally Green
Oh, they're gonna have to do some big upselling on that!

Sam Birkett
Actually, sorry, I've given the wrong thing. So Coca-Cola Life, sorry, it's called Coca-Cola Life.

Sally Green
Are they trying to make it ecological? It's completely sustainable, only made with sound things? Is that where they're going with that?

Sam Birkett
Yes, it's made with certain sweeteners, so reduced calories, but it's also made with particular sweeteners. So we were going to move on to internationalised segmentation. This was first released in Argentina and Chile after five years of research together with other countries, and the formulation varied by market location and in some areas, the original formulation had been phased out in favour of zero calorie version, I think Coke Zero. It was discontinued in 2020s when Coca-Cola company, discontinuing underperforming brands. Okay. That's interesting, that seems to have been discontinued because I saw some the other day, whether they re-launched, perhaps, but interesting. So for a particular remote country and regions of a country, a couple of countries, they produce that.

Sally Green
That is really interesting, because geographic segmentation is probably one of the most important things you need to do and when I was marketing director for an international company was selling educational books to all over the world and at one point, we just sold the same concept to everybody, everybody got this reading scheme, that's everyone does it like this off, you go bye, and then we actually redid the whole website and we had a completely different web front, for our readers in South America, in the South Americas, or in the Caribbean, or in Southeast Asia, they all had a different persona, it wasn't just that they were reading these types of books or doing this with our product, it was they are completely different people, you know, they worship on a Friday, not a Sunday. Their expectations, you can't put pegs into any of these particular books, there were really fundamental differences and it could be that I think you said earlier that you have to that may be one of your first segmentation activities actually. If you're doing lots of campaigns, which are, you know, full of Percy Pig, or you know, whatever it is, maybe that's not going to go down so terribly well in the Middle East and you might need to think about that.

Sam Birkett
Yes, exactly. Well, that's it, isn't it? I mean, and it comes down again. It's the whole thing of the product you're putting forward and then say what I say the sensibilities of the audience that you're talking to and what they need, what they want. I mean, it's interesting, I just, I was reminded suddenly, of when I used to be at the University in Oxford, we're doing marketing there and there was people who did more public affairs and reputational management, crisis, reputation management and things like that. It's a whole study area of the business school, and they, it was really interesting, I was doing a talk once talking about, what are the reputations that matter? So yes, you have a reputation. You can translate it to you have a brand, to you know, but which are the things that matter, that we're using that and more the context of, well, if your company was to do something wrong, or make a mistake, would that matter as much as if it made a mistake over here, which one thing could cost billions of pounds and one thing could cost a couple hundred thousand. But in terms of the reputational damage, which only cost a few hundred thousand today is going to cost you billions of pounds in the future, you know, so that sort of... and I only sort of thought of that because you were saying about making errors of you know, trying to push the wrong thing and the wrong whole for various cultural etc. reasons, things like that. Thanks for listening to part one of this episode looking at granular segmentation. We hope you've enjoyed it and we'll mention this the end of part two. But if you do have any thoughts on this, we'd love to hear from you about examples of segmentation where it's worked well and data insights that you've gained, perhaps or examples you've seen out there in the world of segmentation. So please don't feel afraid to come forward and contact us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or even at meanderspod@gmail.com. Bye for now.