Courtesy of http://www.morpace.com
“A meaningful segment is any group of customers that meets three criteria:
- they are identifiable by common characteristics,
- they are profitable, and
- they are growing.”
- Brent R. Grover, Evergreen Consulting, LLC, advising the wholesale distribution channel.Segmenting customers by buying style is the easiest way to identify customers with common psychographic characteristics.
While some buying style characteristics can be observed, unfortunately most marketers never meet their customers. Enter the online survey. After having thousands of surveys taken by customers, we can attest that it takes years to dial in a survey to accurately identify psychographic characteristics, without asking the questions directly.
What do we mean by buying style psychographic characteristics? Their primary motivation, for one: is it Control, Fun, Intimacy or Avoiding Frustration? Knowing these differences can have a major impact on how you create programs, campaigns and activities to reach these customers.
The most important buying style characteristic is how the customer gathers information and makes buying decisions. Is it based on data and facts or people and feelings? This one differentiator, once identified, can drastically change marketing plans, campaigns and messages.
Other common buying style characteristics are whether they have a natural preference towards the future, a product or service that is going to have a positive future impact, or are more comfortable buying solutions that have been proven in the past and can solve the present problem, a past/present orientation.
A more observable buying style characteristic is whether the customer has a planned approach to life – their day is scheduled and interruption are considered an annoyance – or whether they have a flexible approach, where they welcome new information even if it is an interruption. The scheduled customer tends to make a decision and stick with it. The flexible customer will change their decision based on new information.
All of these are important distinguishing criteria when presenting products, upgrades and services through print, web and email campaigns.
If you can segment your customer by buying style psychographic characteristics, then you can sell, market and service the most profitable, growing groups in exactly the way they wish to be treated. That is certain to increase the long-term value of that group.
To learn how easy it is to segment your customers by psychographic attributes with a 4-minute online survey, contact me.
Gene Bellotti
