Until now, those of us who dedicated ourselves to this Marketing thing loved Segment. That’s how we spent the days, segmenting. Now not anymore, or yes, but it is useless. Segmentation has stopped making sense, at least as we knew it.
If we take the definition of segmentation that Beerli gives: “the tool through which the market is divided into different groups of homogeneous customers, whose supposed reactions to marketing efforts will be the same or similar” (Beerli A – “Segment behaviors of the Retail Banking Market “)
And this gives us problems, problems because in the first place, we are not able to find homogeneous groups of clients and, of course, since we do not find homogeneous groups, we are not going to find people with the same or similar reactions to our marketing efforts.
And this, in my opinion, is happening for several reasons, but the main one is because the traditional segmentation variables are no longer valid. The brave men and women of Marketing tried to identify these homogeneous groups of clients based on four variables: Age, sex, income and geography. So we thought that the man, wealthy (upper middle class, we used to say), urban between 35 and 55 years, behaved differently to women, poor (lower middle class, was politically correct), rural and minus 35. And now, I tell you, this does not seem to happen, in reality it has never happened, but in times of joy (Before the crisis) the thing was not noticeable.
And it does not happen because:
- The Rentit is no longer a valid indicator to segment. Until now we had rich and poor and now, with the one that is falling, it seems that also; but a poor person (It is to understand us) also consumes, travels, buys things. Now people invest in their hobbies and it is not strange to see people who like cycling, a guess, with good material pedaling on a Sunday morning at the Casa de Campo, regardless of their level of income. The people of developed societies, and ours despite everything, we invest in our hobbies and what happens, but it is hard to understand, is that the rich can afford more hobbies than the poor. But in the hobby that coincides, they invest the same thing. Or is it that the latest model of the Mizuno shoes is only bought by the rich? How many cycling fans with an annual income of less than 24?
- The Age does not help us either, it is enough to take a walk on a Sunday the hour of the aperitif for the traditional and mocking district of the Austrias to see how a lot of forty-year-olds resist to stop being young. They smoke cigarettes of laughter, while they wear Converse. Before the children did not want to wear what their parents were wearing, now it is the parents who take Stussy’s sweatshirt from their children, while helping their neighbor to cross with the Bugaboo trolley.
- What the sex was seen coming for years and thanks to the vaunted incorporation of women into the labor market consumption patterns are no longer different between sexes. There are women and men who cook and women and men who do not. Sex in New York is a comedy starring women suitable for all sexes. And to complicate everything (marquetinianamente speaking, of course) the Pink Money every time conditions more the proposal than do the marks, independently of the sexual tendencies that each one is very free to do and do it with whoever wants / can.
- We still have the Geography and it does not seem that we can find something out there. The line between the rural and the urban way of life every time, if it exists, is more invisible. Your Facebook friends, wherever they are, have more ability to influence your habits than the neighbor above, a tacky yuppie who makes ostentation his brand image, or personal branding `to get cool.
And in those we are, the segmentation, as we knew it, does not make much sense, but as is / are the majority of the “marquetineros” managers and the pasta that we left in ERP’s, CRM, and various tools that They tell us things like: 76% of people who buy diapers, buy beer also in the same act of purchase. Solution: Beer diapers for children with tummy and tendency to the bar. (Just kidding, uh … just in case). And it is that we are out there, we must go to what we buy all who wants and have pasta to pay for what we offer. But that leads us to rethink the organization, to introduce flexibility in production, in logistics, in the configuration of the price, to communicate differently from what we have done so far, to think about the market and not about the product, , aa, … .. Ufff a lot of work with the cold it does! I stay as I am, close to the brazier that is warm and managing little by little the misery, instead of thinking about how to create wealth that is healthy.