Targeting Strategy in Action

Brand teams often feel challenged to evolve a broad target market into meaningful segments. In a recent webinar with Radius, Josh Lew, Global Consumer Insights Lead at Energizer Global Auto Care, shared how his team developed optimal targeting strategies to evolve its leadership position in the market.

“Segmentation really sets the foundation for a lot of the strategic areas that drive brand growth and sales like positioning, innovation, and communications,” Josh explained. “It allows us to uncover new business opportunities and improve the existing ones so we can go after new audiences, cross-sell with other products or services and ultimately grow.”

Josh offered six tips on how to successfully take your organization on a segmentation journey:

• 1. Listen to signals that segmentation is needed, so you know when the time is right to invest in it. A segmentation is likely warranted if the brand team cannot clearly and concisely articulate who its consumers are as easily as you might describe your best friend.
• 2. Respect the company culture and how it plays a critical role in the success of the segmentation. Understand your entire organizational audience, including the influencers, the detractors, the different levels of experience, and marketing sophistication.
• 3. Build demand inside your organization. Create shared ownership for the segmentation by educating stakeholders on the process, embracing all views and input, and creating a continuous feedback loop for refinement throughout the journey.
• 4. Take a holistic view and understand the entire potential audience before you start dividing it into segments. This customer-centric view is a critical part of the preparation work. If you define the pie too small, you may miss opportunities.
• 5. Build data-driven segments by merging sophisticated analytical techniques with more creative qualitative approaches, such as ethnographies, to understand the nuances of customers.
• 6. Activate the insights throughout the organization. Find creative ways to socialize and embed the learnings so the segmentation creates a lasting imprint, well into the future.

“The best segmentations emerge from iterations of both advanced analytics and collaborative customer discussions,” explained Josh. This integrated approach results in a segmentation that is:

• Meaningful to people and makes intuitive sense
• Clearly differentiated in terms of needs, attitudes and behaviors
• Measurable in terms of size and revenue potential
• Accessible, through standard go-to-market approaches

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Related: Listen to Josh Lew share tips about building demand for segmentation within your organization in this 2-minute webinar excerpt. Or view the full webinar (YouTube).