In Communities: Forget Market Segments – Embrace Consumer Tribes
Most marketers have been trained to use market segments as part of their strategy to approach certain groups of people. Unfortunately when you try to leverage communities as part of your business that no longer works.
Marketers need to move away from market segments, which are based on characteristics, and instead embrace consumer tribes, which are based on behavior.
To understand the difference, let’s use a hypothetical example. Imagine a large health club chain which decides to leverage communities as part of their business. They could target health conscious people, who want a good quality of life and believe in balance between mind and body, as a basis from which to build a community – that would be using market segmentation. Alternatively, they could look at the tribes that typically hang out at health clubs – such as weightlifters or stay-at-home moms. Weightlifters like to show off and enjoy an audience, they are competitive, they like talking about how much they can lift and what their goals are. Stay-at-home moms prefer fewer people at the gym when they go, preferable women, and like to talk about children issues and community issues.
Now which communities will be more successful in this case? Those designed around the market segment or those designed around the behaviors of tribes?
Reminder: If you leverage communities as part of your business and have not yet taken the survey for the 2009 Tribalization of Business, please do so now, or visit the new Tribalization of Business Site.
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You know, I used to believe the same thing until my clients wanted to run their segmentation screeners on the communities I was managing. At first I resisted – why run a diagnostic designed to separate people into behaviors and types when we have actual, real people talking to each other in realtime.
But once we started to connect segmentation to the communities, it increased the value of the community in the minds of the more traditional brand, marketing, and research people on the client side. They finally realized this very point – rather than creating strategies and tactics around fictional customer profiles, here they had access to them, in real time.
This approach makes all kinds of sense. Seems like measuring behavior would be important, not just pigeonholing (weightlifters “all” do this, mom’s “all” do this).