Market segmentation in consumer research is essential for effective marketing, as it recognizes that products and services cannot appeal to everyone universally. By identifying specific groups with varying attitudes, needs, and motivations, segmentation research enables companies to develop a targeted portfolio of brands and tailor marketing communications to distinct consumer segments.
Segmentations should be purpose-built and customized for each product category, involving an investigative and often multi-modal phased design and analysis process. In this blog, we’re going to discuss a few of the most common, and most useful, types of customer segmentations that will help build a nuanced understanding of your customers.
1. Attitudinal Segmentation (also known as psychographic segmentation)
In an attitudinal segmentation, we group consumers based on their attitudes, beliefs, and perceptions related to your brand, products, and competitors. This kind of segmentation is ideal for creating emotionally resonant marketing messages and helping position your brand to align with consumer values.
Attitudinal segmentation creates opportunities to refine brand messaging and improve consumer engagement by targeting groups with specific attitudes toward your product, service, or the brand as a whole.
2. Behavioral Segmentation
Behavioral segmentation groups the market based on consumer behaviors, such as purchasing patterns, product usage, or brand loyalty. It includes key aspects of purchase behavior, usage rates, and benefits sought from a product or service. And it is particularly useful in tailoring marketing messages and promotions to fit specific consumer habits, enhancing customer engagement and retention.
3. Needs-Based Segmentation
In a needs-based segmentation, we focus on grouping consumers based on their specific needs, pain points, or motivations regarding products or services. It focuses on identifying what drives customer purchases, ranging from functional requirements to emotional or psychological desires.
We find that needs-based segmentations are an excellent way to integrate the actual needs of different customer segments into your product or service development, ensuring that solutions are tailored to the people you are trying to reach.
4. Occasion-Based Segmentation
Occasion-based segmentations focus on product/service use in different situations, identifying diverse consumer needs and opportunities for growth.
This kind of segmentation is ideal for marketing strategies around events, holidays, or seasonal trends. This approach allows companies to create timely and relevant campaigns that resonate with consumers during specific occasions.
5. Shopper Segmentation
Groups people based on their needs, attitudes, and behaviors when shopping for a product or service. Shopper segmentations are an essential part of any retail or e-commerce strategy. The data gained from a shopper segmentation can help optimize promotional strategies, e-commerce experiences, product placement, store layouts, and more.
This kind of segmentation is one of C+R’s specialties, and our proprietary SmartMarket Shopper Segmentation can easily be incorporated into your research initiatives to provide you with the information you need to understand and reach people where they shop, how they shop.
6. Marrying Behaviors and Attitudes
Combines transactional (behavioral) data with attitudinal insights to create more nuanced segments.
This hybrid segmentation approach is powerful for developing more targeted marketing strategies that consider both what consumers do and how they feel, leading to more effective messaging and product offerings. We recommend this approach for companies that need insights to guide their long-term marketing strategies as well as shorter-term initiatives.
Each segmentation model provides unique insights that can be leveraged across various marketing strategies, from product development to targeted advertising, ensuring that companies reach the right audience with the right message.
For more information, check out our primer to segmentation research and when you’re ready to get started with a custom segmentation for your brand, get in touch with us here.
