I stumbled across a post the other day by Scott Brinker, the President and CTO of ioninteractive.
Scott writes a really interesting blog call Chief Marketing Technologist – words that don’t typically, or haven’t typically, shared the same sentence.
He talks about ‘the most important choice’ in online marketing – between the unity of your brand and the individuality of your audience. He means you have to choose how granular your marketing efforts are. Do you slice your audience up into tiny segments, each with some unique characteristic, and serve them a tailored message? Or do you stick to one or two segments and deliver a far less fragmented communication?
The first comment I would make, and with all due respect to Scott, is that I don’t think you need to trade off the unity of your brand. Brands are multidimensional to begin with. Whether you like to use Brand Onions, Layers, Pillars, etc. to conceptualize it, your brand is made up of a core belief and around that (or under it or above it) different manifestations of that belief (values, feelings, attributes).
I think Scott is talking more about the effort you need to go to as an online Marketer to segment your communication efforts by targeting a few groups or a few hundred! You don’t necessarily need to trade off your brand unity for this, nor should you, you just need to find manifestations of your brand’s core idea that work for these segments.
But before you even go down this road, I think there is another very important strategic choice – whether or not an individual in your market is made up of multiple segments themselves!
I was recently doing some work for a major national restaurant chain. They had a traditional segmentation that divided the entire market into five or six groups. Typical groups you would think of – the family oriented crowd, the sports bar crowd, etc. The problem was that while these groups represented a dominant attitude for an individual, it was only one of many. We discovered the ‘sports bar’ enthusiast was eating out with his family on the weekend in a quiet and relaxed setting. His ‘sportiness’ was still there, it had just been overshadowed by a different set of needs – relaxing, quiet, family time. Talking to the ‘sports guy’ only about bar food and alcohol missed an entire other opportunity – family get-togethers. One that happend to represent a GREATER proportion of his wallet.
I think there are lessons here for online marketers. Especially because online tools are easily deployed for different needs.
Take Gmail for instance. I use it both for work and personal email, but I use it slightly more for work. If Google segmented me into a ‘work’ group it would miss an opportunity to sell me on personal tools.
it sounds simple when you put it like that. But most marketers shy away from defining their audience along overlapping need lines. You are typically either in one segment or another, not both!
I’m not too sure how this idea changes Scott’s original representation of the trade-off. In some ways it might make it easier. Instead of focusing on the quirkiness of individuals, who all have traits that make them different, you just need to find out all the ways your product/service is being used/deployed. Consolidate your communications efforts around these different needs and allow individuals to float in and out.
The strategic question then becomes static segments versus dynamic need states?
Who ever said marketing wasn’t complicated?
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