So.. where to begin?  In my opinion, one of the defining characteristics of Marketing 2.0 is its reliance on scientific method to segment, target and personalize the experience for customers and prospects. Over the last several years, companies such as Dell, Microsoft, Apple and yes, even SAP have been changing the way they go-to-market. Chris Koch over at the IT Services Marketing Association has a recent piece on Segmentation/Personalization. Chris says:

Customer segmentation in most companies is starting to look like a hairy knuckle dragger, mired in a Stone Age era defined mostly by demographics. The successor on the evolutionary scale, segmentation by  vertical, is so commonplace that it is going to win as many battles for business as a Bronze Age spear.

I couldn’t disagree more with this assertion.  The marketing scales have shifted dramatically over the last few years, with marketing as “science” far outweighing, marketing as “art.”  Tools such as attitudinal segmentation, conjoint analysis along with measurements like Net Promoter Score are just a few of the arrows in the marketing quiver today that have moved marketing into the 21st century with a scientific hyper-targeting capable approach.

Its clear that “new” marketers freely and without hesitation rely on “science” to make their “art” more impactful with targets.

Efforts around attitudinal segmentation and conjoint analysis give ya two things: (1) an understanding of who will buy from you and why - what do they care about, what’s their buying style and (2) what levers in your “offer stack” your pricing, your packaging, the time it takes to get your solution up and running etc… that if you optimized would drive more market share capture.  Using these two marketing as science methods also lays the foundation for a great customer experience by enabling your personalization strategy. If you understand your attitudinal segments and you understand how to deliver content that is specific to each segment, voila, you have yourself a personalization strategy.

I’ll speak further about how to move away from “traditional” segmentation to more scientific, fact-based approaches in future posts… but a question. is this what you’re looking for?