The psychographic profiling that passes for market segmentation these days is a mostly wasteful diversion from its original and true purpose – discovering customers whose behavior can be changed or whose needs are not being met.

REDISCOVERING

SEGMENTATION
BY DANIEL YANKELOVICH AND DAVID MEER

A KET
T
HERE ARE MANY DIFFERENT KINDS

of people, and they display about as many different buying patterns. That simple truth is well understood by those responsible for market research, product development, pricing, sales, and strategy. But they haven’t been getting much help from a venerable technique– market segmentation – which, if properly applied, would guide companies in tailoring their product and service offerings to the groups most likely to purchase them. Instead, market segmentation has become narrowly focused on the needs of advertising, which it serves mainly by populating commercials with characters that viewers can identify with – the marketing equivalent of central casting.

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DAVID PLUNKERT

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Re d i s co v e r i n g M a r ke t S e g m e n tat i o n

This is hardly the state of affairs we anticipated 40 years ago when one of us introduced the concept of nondemographic segmentation in these pages as a corrective to the narrow reliance on purely demographic ways of grouping consumers. In 1964, in “New Criteria for Market Segmentation,” Daniel Yankelovich asserted that: • Traditional demographic traits such as age, sex, education levels, and income no longer said enough to serve as a basis for marketing strategy. • Nondemographic traits such as values, tastes, and preferences were more likely to influence consumers’ purchases than their demographic traits were. • Sound marketing strategy depended on identifying segments that were potentially receptive to a particular brand and product category. The idea was