2021/10/people-blocks-1080.jpg Hand of a businessman picking a wooden cube block with icon people standing out from the crowd.
Hand of a businessman picking a wooden cube block with icon people standing out from the crowd.

5 ways to assess the COVID impact on your targets.

Jamie Myers, Radius Insights, Radius Global Market Research 2021/10/jamie-myers-bio.jpg

by Jamie Myers

Executive Director

In one form or another, most companies focus their business planning around a set of target segments. If you’re one of those companies, you’ve likely spent days and weeks finding ways to understand the impact of COVID on your targeting strategy.

We’ve been guiding brands in refreshing, revamping, or re-evaluating their segments across all industries, from financial services to outdoor living products. The goal, of course, is how much customer priorities and behaviors have changed during this time, and whether targets need a new approach.

Segmentation is a big investment and the foundation for many strategic choices. Rather than wait it out to see what has been left in the wake of COVID in 2021, it’s best to take some action today, assess the lay of the land, and prepare your brand accordingly for success today and beyond.”

While that may seem daunting, here are 5 easy steps you can take to assess the changing needs of targets:

1. Refresh your personas by using various digital qualitative approaches to deep dive with your targets.

2. Follow your targets for a few days, via bulletin boards, and have them report back on different experiences, missions, and tasks that are relevant to how you think about them.

3. Immerse in your targets’ daily lives to see if they are operating and thinking the way you’d expect them to, by using things like virtual ethnographies, shopumentaries, or other immersive tools.

4. Run a quick resizing based on the characteristics that define your segments to see if there has been a shift in how your targets are distributing themselves.

5. Do a short profiling exercise to see if key things you knew about your segments remains true today.

 

Immerse in your targets’ daily lives to see if they are operating and thinking the way you’d expect them to.

 

Depending on what you learn from these steps, you can then decide the right course of action:

  • Continue as you were, confident that your targets have held up well
  • Tweak your plans to accommodate minor changes you’re seeing in how your segments are thinking and behaving
  • Shuffle your priorities based on how some of the second-tier segments may be emerging to be more significant to your business
  • Shift gears completely and create a fresh segmentation to line your targets up with the landscape you’re facing today

Segmentation is a big investment and the foundation for many strategic choices. Rather than wait it out to see what has been left in the wake of COVID in 2021, it’s best to take some action today, assess the lay of the land, and prepare your brand accordingly for success today and beyond.

Want to discuss more about assessing your targets?

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