SPEAKER_00 0:16

Mini MBA, how are you? Welcome to QA session two. Here we go again. Some great questions. We've been through segmentation and targeting, leaving diagnosis, starting off with strategy. And so this week, let's let's delve into it in a lot more detail. Yeah, we've got some great questions. I want to try and do it in an hour. Ooh, I'm gonna make you a little bigger so we can see these questions in more detail. Because I thought you were bigger than that. Hang on. And we're gonna kick off with Nicola. To start us off. Nicola, I have a question about the meaningful actionable grid method. Okay. Um the first step involves listing variables to segment our market. And the recommendation is to gather the whole team to brainstorm them. I'd love to hear more about how you manage those sessions in practice. Do you tend to focus on variables that emerged from previous research? Do you encourage the group to come up with new ones? I'm also curious about how to frame the exercise so that colleagues from other departments find it useful. When quant data isn't available for certain variables, have you found that a democratic scoring system works well? Yeah, look, I did it hundreds of times. I found that it was really valuable as a mutually beneficial uh session. Um, you've really got to know what you're doing because you're leading them, right? And that there really is a leap of trust where you're gonna be like, right, we've got six or seven variables here, let's play around with how they might look. Yeah. Um, I when I did it, I would always do like a simple example first. I would say, look, we're gonna, you know, we'll do, I used to do this smoking exercise. We're doing anti-smoking exercise in the office. Here's everyone that works in the company. Now let's put some variables in there about who smokes, how often do they smoke, yeah? Do they smoke in the office or not? And you sort of try to get some meaningful, actionable grids together. That can be very helpful. Um, I think you're probably better keeping it to the marketing team to begin with. Have the sales force come in kind of midway through to validate it and then get more involved in it. Um, there's a great technique, well, which we talked about briefly, which is percentages of percentages. And if you get the basic percentages, you can make some pretty good, not accurate, but good estimates of how big the segments are, and you really need those size estimates in there because that speaks to it as much as the segments themselves. But yeah, I I uh the the longer I've worked in consulting, the more I think doing it in a more dangerous uh collegiate way is the way to get it done so we all work on it together. Um, but yeah, getting people in the room to do it on a big on a big whiteboard, use a whiteboard. Um, the one big tip is when you get to your you're gonna get to your list of three or four variables, yeah. Um there's no logic in that next stage where you actually draw them out and sort of create, you just gotta move things around till you get something that's useful. And then, you know, it is like like the TV we talked about. You've got like a high definition TV, and then you kind of try to collapse as much as you can without starting to put different customers in the same group. You you're gonna do it in the exam, yeah, at the end of the course, you're gonna build one in the exam. So that's gonna help you, I think, we have a bit more experience on the process. Definitely worthwhile and produce really useful. Philip, as somebody coming from the dark side from how brands grow, I'm very curious how you see category entry points fit into segmentation. I don't think they do. We're currently segmenting by CEPs and optimizing most of our marketing activities towards them. Yeah, look, I think it's fine. I think you know, category entry points are great. Um, you can't drive into maybe insights more that come out of the consumer's general life. It's very anchored in the category, but you know, it's a small trade-off. Um, I don't think segments and category entry points work together at all. You're either saying, look, I'm going after everyone in the market, and these are my five category entry points, or you're saying, I'm going after everyone in the market. Um, and then this group here I'm going to activate. But my challenge to you, you know, I guess at the end of the day, if you accept my two-speed argument, we're doing mass marketing to everyone, and then there are these different groups to be activated that are not a million miles away from category entry points, right? They're just more transient and there's more, you know, opportunities to do it differently. But they sort of look the same. But look, I don't think there's anything wrong with category entry points. I think they make perfect sense, and I think you should you should get on with it. Andy, backwards market research feels like it sits on a knife edge. Done well, it makes findings actionable. Done badly, it's confirmation bias. It's not though, Andy. So you would think that until you do it. And what happens when you do it is you the data just leaves you, you know, you it's like people will often say, oh, you should never run your own focus group because you'll bias the findings. Try doing it. Try biasing a focus group. People, you know, in the room, you go, so what you're saying is the product's okay. And people go, no, no, no, that's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is this. In the same way, on paper, maybe you would imagine backwards market research confirms stuff. But you're not saying I'm going to test these five variables to see which of them or all of them correlate with purchase. What you're saying is I need to find out what the variables are, and then I need to correlate them with purchase. I don't know what they are yet. The qualitative will influence it. We'll still have to find have objective data showing us what works and what doesn't work. So as long as there's a bit of quall there at the start, and as long as you're relatively smart, I don't think it's going to happen. My experience of it was it never, it never went that way in practice. What separates the two in practice, you say? Um you'll find here's a here's a meta point for you. You'll find, Andy Tompkins, that the very th the very fact you're worried about confirmation bias means you won't have any confirmation bias. That's literally what's going to happen. So I I just encourage you to get on with it. It's such a huge win with no real risk, I promise. You'll see when you get into it. Budi, if you use the meaningful actionable grid as a segmentation model, I feel that purchase attitudes, category behavior, and decision-making data are missing for each segment. Sometimes why are you not including those in the segments? Well, because they look great on paper, Budi, but then what you find is targeting and getting reaching out to those things among the segments is very, very hard to do. I would think that this information would enable me to potentially collapse even more. Yeah, if you if it's actionable. And I would then have a much better understanding of what my intervention should look like per segment. If the cost of training is a barrier for the SME segment, you would develop an instalment payment plan for that segment. I'm with you, but here's the difference, buddy. Let's say I get into one of these segments, right? And it's it is, they're quite broad segments, right? We don't have huge insight. The first thing we're gonna do is then go and visit three or four of them to build a more detailed portrait from qualitative research, and that stuff's gonna come out. So it'll be there. It's just gonna come out of a more um descriptive process. Tina, I'm hoping you can help me think through market segmentation for a multi-service business. It's one business with six distinct service areas, each serving different customer segments with different branding. The challenge I keep coming back to is I'm unsure about the total mass market. There we go. So I feel like I can't move forward when approaching segmentation and clustering. The question I'm stuck on is do I define the organization's total addressable market, everyone in the region who could use any of our services? Yes, um, each segment enters through a different door based on their primary motivation, but they're all part of the same mass market. Or do I treat each service area as its own mass market and segment separately? My yes, okay, your instinct is right. It's a listen, put the brands away, put the targeting away, put the positioning away. We haven't done that yet, Tina, right? Do it in sequence. What is the sequence? Finish your research, build a segmentation of the market. Market segmentation is about the market. It's got nothing to do with you or your seven brands, okay? Segment the market. And once you've got a nice map of the market, right? We can then go, right? Who do we want to target? Again, nothing to do with the brands yet. Which of these segments do I want to go for? Now, next we're going to say, how would I position to these guys? Yeah. And now you begin to think about the brands in your armory. I'm telling you now, there's some disruptive thoughts ahead. But for now, market segmentation about the market. Remember, Tina, if your competitor was as smart as you with one brand, she would design potentially the same segmentation. Your instinct is right, get on with it. Jenny Armstrong. Three questions on mobile, on module two, if possible. What are your thoughts on using your existing consumer database to conduct market research and surveys? The pro is low cost, the cons not necessarily representative. Well, definitely not representative, and it can impact future database engagement. When you're choosing a representative sample, what is the key determinant to determine how far you go? E.g., the Constellation Brands example went only for wine drinkers. Why not legal per okay? So, yeah, you you get it, Jenny. That the um there's nothing wrong with using your own database with obvious caveats. Yeah, these are your customers, there's big segments that not only aren't represented, but maybe not even there. Okay, so you've got to worry about that. But at the same time, if you've got that worry, you can still use it for some insight. The bigger question is, and we've answered this already, you have to decide what the total market is. In the constellation example, they went with people that buy wine. That's not the right or wrong answer, it's their strategic decision. Yeah. You can even cut it further and go, look, we're a small company, people that buy Italian wine will be our total market. Yeah, it's up to you. But what you're struggling with, Jenny, is absolutely this key point. You've got to decide that at an early phase in this in this process. Who who is my market? The total market? What business am I in? And then we'll move on from there. Yeah, you'll need that. And also you say, what do you mean by the dodgy programmatic revolution? A lot of programmatic is uh uh I used to call it a a box of turds and spiders. It you know, if you actually look at what you're buying with programmatic buying, you're not buying what they're selling you. Yeah, you know, we're still unable for the most part to identify whether an internet targeted uh user is male or female better than a coin flip. Look into it. Yeah, it's it's you know, it's it's really, with some very notable first-party exceptions, extraordinarily oversold. Madita, a more philosophical question, but why should we even segment people into groups? Assuming that consumers often have several needs and that these needs change over time, would it not make more sense to segment different need states and target those? Yeah, you could do it that way, Madita. Absolutely. The argument is economic, that we we can't make a different product for every individual customer and everyone is different. And at the same time, strategically, we often fall foul when we try and create one product for everyone. So the the point about segmentation was it was a middle ground, it enabled us to get economies of scale and reach a particular customer with particular needs. If that segment was done on need states at a certain time, it would still be segmentation and it still makes sense. Everything is up for grabs. Nicole, I'm a B2B marketer. Regarding ethnography, in my case, although I'm trying to understand the problem uh ownership, decision trigger, and decision authority of Samsung semiconductors today, our cell team and myself do not have contact. In this case, how do you recommend we do ethnography? Well, Nicole, there's you know, it's it's called a backstage pass. You have to either pay them, you have to uh ring them up and ask them if you can come and chat with them, you have to hang out at conferences and chat with them. There is no textbook on how you do this, but somehow you've got to reach out to your friends in the industry, to existing customers. It's the entrepreneurial part of research, but it can and should be done. Yeah, and it it's it's a barrier, but it's a barrier you can get over. Jenny, can you share a link to the professional idiot book? My Google searches are showing Steve O from Jackass. That can't be the right one. Hey, I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't go against it. I'm gonna do it right now for you because otherwise we'll lose it. I think it's John Van Manen. Uh uh, but I may be wrong, and if I am, I'll look into it more. Yeah, you're right. It does come up as Steve O. That's not the book I intended for you. But it now, yeah, I see. It dominates uh it domin since I read The Professional Idiot. Uh it has completely taken over Google. Yeah, I get it. I'll I'll post something on LinkedIn. That's unfortunate, isn't it? Yeah. I think it's Stengers. We'll find out. Or I'll post something, Jenny. Time has moved on. Mike Norfleet. I'm interested in getting more information about how to use synthetic research in B2B markets. I imagine using it to test new product ideas, size market opportunities, maybe even uncover new problems. Please provide some feedback on these uses and share more applications of synthetic data. Please share references where I can learn more. Um look, I I have a slight bias because I own 2% of the company. I don't think it's going to make me a brazilionaire. It might though. Um go and look at the uh uh muscle there. Go and look at the Evidenza site, Mike. You don't have to hire Evidenza, but Evidenza uh have a really good website that goes through use occasions and shows you examples of of the work that can be done with synthetics. Um you can use it for anything you use regular research for, and it's pretty revolutionary in B2B. So start with Evi Denza. They are the market leaders, and we'll use them at the end of the course to talk about AI. So I'd go there first. Though I do have a link to I own 2% of Evidenza and I own 2% of Tracksuit. Again, I don't think either are gonna make me neither of those amounts changes my behavior, right? But I need to declare it, I think. Alice, I'm in a B2B industry. We're now developing innovative solutions for battery segments, and the target is to build scalable business for long-term profitable growth. No shit. I think I think we're all in that that business, Alice. We're now using ethnography to collect customer voices and unmet needs. Since this solution is breakthrough technology, sometimes customers may not know what exactly they want. And sometimes top industry players don't rely heavily on external suppliers because they have stronger RD capability, they rely on their own chemistry capability to solve the problem. Is there a better way to understand the consumer's unmet needs and validate our breakthrough technology? Um, no, I think you've got the right tool. It's ethnography. Look, Alice, customers will never tell you what they want with research. Yeah? Customers will tell you everything but that, and then you have to work out what the solution is. That's the strategy part. So if you hadn't imagined ethnography, I would have told you go and do ethnography. But don't expect the customers to tell you what they want. You have to see the need, articulate the need, and work from there. Okay? But you're doing the right thing. Just keep going. You'll see. Rowan, targeting customer portrait. The example of Mondelez and Sanofi has some very detailed information, down background information about specific personnel in within the marketing training department. Would that information have been derived from one of the five types of market research? Yeah. Or separate conversions and inputs from the sales team. The context of the question is how do you build the best customer portraits if your market research has a lighter touch? So one thing you can do, Rowan, is you can, once you've done your segmentation, you can go back to the data because you've now done targeting of this segment. So you can go back to the data to build that portrait, or you can jump forward and do some more one-on-ones just with this customer and build a richer portrait that way. Either way, it works really well. Emma, when segmenting a B2B like GE, what does it mean to segment at a firm level? Well, what it means is it's like demographics for firms. McKinsey invented the idea of firmographics. So that means things like public-private, uh, number of employees, sector, sick code, whether you have an international business or not, they're descriptive variables of B2B. That's what the firm level means. Oh, there's another meaning. When I talk to companies about in B2B about doing segmentation, I personally prefer that you segment at the firm level, uh, not at the decision maker level. So if I when I was segmenting medical businesses, the the unit inside the segmentation were hospitals. Yeah. And if after I targeted a bunch of hospitals, I would then pull apart the buying committee and the surgeon and the CEO and how they all decided. But I wouldn't put that in the segmentation. The segmentation was done at the firm level. That's what it also means. Emma, how does the hybrid segmentation approach avoid the segmentation journey? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if I did I say that we avoided the segmentation journey. I'll go back and check. Emma again, how can you tell if a behavioral segmentation fits into the marketing plan or not? As you mentioned in the looking for differences bullet point, stating that some aren't necessary. Um it's got you need a segmentation or you need a mass marketing approach to proceed your targeting decision. So it's gonna fit into the marketing plan, whatever you do, Emma, right? Uh Emma, couldn't you encounter spill couldn't you encounter spillover with any segment? Or are you just focusing on the most on the most spillover in certain segments? There's always spillover, literally, you know, between any segment. They're gonna have some interaction, butterfly effect. What we're talking about is a significant one that has a manifest impact on the behavior of another segment. So yeah, it's the it's the big ones. Yeah, in theory, all you know, people are in a population and they're interacting. Companies respond to other companies. These are big ones that drive someone forward or away from something that really make a difference and you want to call out. Uh Madita, how do you feel about running cluster analysis on large primary data sets that includes all sorts of all sorts of data, behavioral, psychographic, attitudinal, and then having a market research background? I always thought segmentation was basically synonymous with cluster analysis. Yeah, it is. So here's the problem, Medita, you're not wrong. So segmentation, certainly in the 80s and the 90s, was cluster analysis in K-means. The problem is actionability. So what we can do is take a sample of 400 consumers uh who are representative, and we can cluster them into six segments. Yeah. And we know the sizes, and because the sample's representative, we can extrapolate those sizes to the whole population. So now I know there's a segment of consumers who like environmental high luxury things, um, and we know that they're 12% of the market. The problem with that whole cluster analysis approach is I don't know how to get to that group in the real world. I just know there's 12% of them. That's a big problem. Yeah. If you're not worried about building segmentation as much as you're worried about actually doing good marketing in the in in business, does that make sense? So cluster analysis is great, actionability is the weakness, and that's why I'm uh spent a long time doing that approach many years ago. I think it falls down on so what that's great. Like global teams all the time will send a country here, are your there's 12% of these guys, and there's 18% of these guys, and there's 24% of these guys, and the country are like, yeah, what do we do with this? Who how do we get them? Actionability. May Lee. I work across APAC. Uh our global HQ did a meaningful segmentation about six years ago, which has gradually been forgotten over time. I'm thinking if we could revive it, how does it make sense to update the figures of for just the APAC region? Global will be too hard for me right now. I noticed your example of meaningful actionable was UK. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, uh May Lee, I think it's a great point. You could just take their variables, turn them into questions, ask them of a representative sample, and you're gonna get, as we said a minute ago, proportions, and hopefully, if they're actionable segments as well, you've got then a route to get hold of them too. Just replicate the research that will update the numbers just for the Asia Pack region. May Lee, in your experience, who is typically the owner of this in a large company? Oh, look, it can be anyone. It can be anyone. It should be the marketing director, yeah, not the insights leader. Because I don't want this to be insights, I want this to be the map by which we go to market. So ideally, the brand manager marketing director in charge of the marketing plan sees segmentation as their map. Uh Camilla, do you have some examples of branding campaigns which are not mass market? Yeah, we'll get to them. We're a bit a bit early yet. Hang on, and we'll I'll show you some examples. When we get to positioning uh and objectives, we'll get we'll get more into it. Nick. Copa. Can segmentation also work if you don't segment customers but segment occasions or needs? In that case, one customer can be part of two segments. Yeah, that's right. For example, I'm running a flower shop and I ask customers, what is the occasion you buy these flowers? And some say I'm going to a party and some say I go to a funeral. But one customer might might buy flowers for both. Yeah, so that's usage occasions. It's close to category entry points as well. And it's absolutely a legitimate way to break up the market into different activations. And yeah, usage occasions. It's beloved of beer companies. Because the beer companies are like, you know, at the end of the day, you're buying beer in different usage occasions. What are they? Is probably a more predictive way than 28-year-old male. Do you know what I mean? Final question, Jared. In Ritson's Monster, you note that creatives aren't strategists. They're not. I fully agree. That brought me to this course. I'm a video producer specialized in the marine industry. And I'm moving our offers from just production to video agency, helping our clients on a more strategic level. That sounds great. My question about the long and the short: the marketers in commercial leisure marine have been notoriously conservative, relying mostly on PR, print ads, and trade shows. Now they feel they have to jump on the social media thing, and many go all in. We're losing market share to in-house content creators and see 22-year-old influencers becoming the de facto marketing strategists in big companies. I'm quite sure that at some point decision makers will realize that no one impulse buys hydraulic cylinders or oil separators on TikTok. I think, Garrett, I would be very worried that you've made a leap of logic there that isn't true. You'll be amazed how dumb many of these people are. But carry on, carry on. Of course, we can't tell these marketers that they're wrong, but the backlash for ignoring the long must surely come. Again, I I agree with you, but I'm not necessarily sure. I see a big disappointment with social media for B2B marketers. Do you have a prediction what happens next? And how could we set up to be on top of that swing? No, I don't think it's going to change at all, Garrett. You're you're discovering something that I have been watching for 15 years, and it hasn't got any better. It's got slightly worse. I I think it's going to stay the same. My only advice is I don't care. And neither should you. Look, marketing is a competition, yeah? Don't try and fix the whole of dumb marketing, it'll never be fixed. Or I I don't want to do that, right? People ask me all the time in interviews, you uh, how do we fix marketing? I'm like, I don't care. I want you to be a winner, yeah. I want you to win. And for you to win, someone else has to lose normally in the marketing competitive world. So I'm quite comfortable with a lot of these people being stupid, yeah, about this kind of stuff. If you know and you can sell it, you will be successful, and that's all I care about. Really, it is me and you and everyone else that doesn't know anything about marketing. Let them struggle, let them overinvest in performance. I think it's a great thing because it will make us more successful, yeah. So my advice is it's not gonna change, don't worry. There won't be some amazing moment of realization. You just you but you're right, and you can make money from this to get on with it. That's what I've been doing. That's what you should do as well. Because it really is true. The power of balancing long and short really is the answer. And so if you know that and they don't, don't tell them. That would spoil all the fun. Go forth and make money from that knowledge. And on that note, we will end our QA. Great questions, shorter than I thought, which is great. I've moved fast, I think, this time. Um, we're gonna move now into the other big weeks of strategy. Positioning is awesome, you're gonna love it. And then we're gonna get to objective setting. So, next week, I'll see you for a Kit Kat in the cafe, and we'll get into a very big, very important topic. See you next week.