Linked Segmentation: The Whole Customer Journey

Mapping one set of personas to another will give you a more realistic view of how consumers behave.

Big data was supposed to mean the end of segmentation, remember? Instead of crude categories, each person is targeted precisely based on who they are and what they want. Millions of segments of one. It hasn’t happened, and probably never will. Individual targeting may work for online advertising, but it doesn’t work for product development or campaign strategy.

Versta Research works with companies and organizations who want a deeper understanding of whom they are selling to, and what makes those customers buy. They can’t understand all one million customers individually. Instead, we develop a conceptual and marketing framework to summarize millions of data points into a core set of types. This helps companies refine their products and services to meet the needs of an ever-fluid customer base.

Here is a case in point. Versta Research provided a quantitative segmentation and mapping that bridged two qualitative ethnographies: one that explored how people shop for big-ticket items, and one that explored how people buy. Shopper personas focused on how and whether people find information. Buyer personas laid out the emotional journey of developing trust and negotiating price.

Our job was to measure, document, and quantify the size of each set of persona groups and to highlight the meaningful characteristics around which big-ticket retailers could design better consumer services, better campaigns, and better sales strategies.

Here is one visual technique we used to map one persona group (or segmentation scheme) to another, highlighting multiple layers of continuity and difference:

You can read more about our other quantitative research methods, or contact us if you would like us to take a look at how you can leverage the segmentations you already have.