By Emily Bielak
As brands strive to understand what drives consumer actions, emotions, and motivations, effective audience segmentation is key to creating tailored strategies that resonate. At the heart of this approach lies a methodology that not only looks at basic demographics but also dives deeper into behaviors, needs, and even emotions.
Let’s explore the different ways to segment audiences and how this allows brands to gain richer insights into the forces shaping consumer or customer decisions.
The Core of Segmentation: Moving Beyond the Basics
Traditionally, marketers have segmented their audiences using four primary approaches:
- Geographic segmentation – targeting based on location, region, population, climate, etc.
- Demographic segmentation – classifying consumers by characteristics like age, gender, education, occupation, industry, or income, etc.
- Behavioral segmentation – identifying patterns in purchasing, usage behaviors, occasion, browsing and shopping habits, etc.
- Psychographic segmentation – focusing on attitudes, values, lifestyles and beliefs; to include needs, personality traits, motivators, opinions, product needs, jobs to be done, emotions and more.
While the first three above are foundational and very common historically, they often only scratch the surface of understanding consumer behavior. Today, brands must move beyond these basics and delve more deeply into that fourth category to tap into more nuanced segments to mine — both for deeper data and the more actionable intelligence it can yield.
Needs-Based Segmentation: Clarifying the Ambiguity
Many brands come to the table asking for “needs-based” segmentation. It’s an enticing concept, but the term can be vague. “Needs” can refer to anything from a product’s performance attributes to more specific requirements like affordability, durability, and even ethical/environmental manufacturing preferences.
For example, in the B2B world, “needs” might encompass a tool’s durability or software’s ability to streamline payroll processes. For consumers, their “need” might be a convenient location or a specific price point. Understanding these core needs helps brands align their offerings to what truly matters for different customer segments. However, rather than lumping all needs into one broad category, it’s critical to break them down.
Segmenting by need involves understanding which features, qualities, or attributes a customer values most when making a purchase. Does durability matter more than price? Is ethical or environmental production a top priority? Both may be considered needs, and both may fall into a particular segment’s purchasing priorities. But which are primary motivators, and which are table stakes? And does segmenting the customer base along very specific, intrinsically primary motivators provide more granular ways to understand various audience cohorts?
Once these distinctions are clear, brands can craft messaging that speaks directly to those specific needs and truly meet people where they are — emotionally, psychologically, and authentically.
Less Common Needs Identified
Psychographic segmentation is perhaps the outlier among the categories we’re exploring. Unlike geography, demographics and behaviors/actions — all of which are self-evident, trackable, and readily available in operational data, psychographics are less obvious and aren’t always easily accessible. On the contrary: attitudes, values, lifestyles, beliefs, emotional motivators, opinions, and the rest need to be examined and extracted first, then applied to the various other segments and customer attributes.
Much of the psychographics segmentation category can be applied to emotions at the point of purchase and at every step along the customer journey. These emotions are typically fluid, and go largely unreported by customers, making the study of which challenging but extremely critical to understanding customer preferences going forward.
In fact, the psychographic influences of a purchase can be dependent on a number of both external and internal factors, which is where refined segmentation can add tremendous value to customer behavior research.
Occasions: The Context of Purchase Decisions
One valuable yet less commonly discussed segmentation strategy is occasion-based. Consumers don’t always buy the same product in the same way or for the same reason. The occasion matters.
Take beer as an example: a consumer might buy a six pack of premium craft beer for a quiet night in but opt for a budget-friendly 24-pack for a tailgate party. By understanding the context of the purchase, brands can tailor their offerings, promotions, and marketing messages to fit those different scenarios and the customer segments experiencing them.
The same goes for other products. Imagine a consumer buying snacks. For their weekly groceries, they might pick up store-brand chips to feed the family for the week. But when entertaining, they may choose a premium brand to make a better impression on invited guests. Brands that segment based on occasions can create strategies that meet customers exactly where they are in each precise moment and the respective reason for purchasing.
Jobs to Be Done: Understanding the Functional Purpose
While the “jobs to be done” framework within market research is not typically applied as a methodology for customer segmentation exercises, my colleagues and I have developed a custom innovation for this and found useful application for it during segmentation studies — especially in the B2B space.
As in the traditional use case for “jobs to be done,” this approach focuses on the specific tasks or functions a customer is trying to achieve with a product or service. Human resources software, for example, might perform multiple jobs, like tracking employee performance, managing payroll, or providing insights into hours worked. Knowing which particular “jobs” are needed by a prospect can help that HR software company’s sales team classify the prospect into a segment, and better communicate more relevant functionality accordingly.
Segmenting audiences based on the jobs they uniquely need done also helps companies refine their product development and ultimate go-to-market strategies. If certain jobs equate to specific product features, but are rarely being completed by a given target customer segment, brands can respond in kind. The company might focus on addressing unmet needs in product development, or consider removing unnecessary features altogether, either of which is likely to result in better product/market fit for that particular segment of user. Ultimately, the marketing modes, media and messaging can be tailored to meet each customer segment with their specific preferred job to be done, while leaving the “clutter” of extraneous features and benefits to another cohort and another campaign.
Emotions: The Heart and Soul of the Human Condition
Segmenting by emotions offers a unique advantage that’s often underutilized. As we recently explored in depth, emotions undoubtedly shape how customers interact with brands, from how satisfied or dissatisfied they are with a service to their excitement or anxiety about making a purchase. (Remember, for certain segments and certain products, anxiety can actually be a positive emotion to lean into, so make no assumptions.)
For example, parents choosing a daycare for their children might feel overwhelmed by the decision. Brands that recognize and address these emotions can differentiate themselves by offering reassurance, guidance, and emotional support early and throughout the customer journey. On the other hand, a confident, well-informed buyer may prefer concise, comparison-driven messaging. This segment may be more enthusiastic about making a purchase sooner, so they would necessarily be treated differently than the emotionally apprehensive. Applying such direct, comparison-driven messaging may come across as sales pressure, thus underscoring the importance of understanding segment emotions at each possible touch point.
This is true of business-to-business sectors as well. In fact, it could be argued that, in some cases, B2B purchase decisions are driven by emotions just as much as consumer purchases are.
The Holistic Approach: Cross-Examining Segments for a Refined View of Reality
What’s essential is recognizing that no one segmentation method works in isolation. The true power lies in combining these approaches to create a holistic view of the customer. By layering geographic, demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data with needs, occasions, jobs to be done, and emotional insights, brands can understand their customers on a much deeper level without sacrificing actionability.
For example, a customer might be categorized as a mother in her mid-30s (demographic), living in a particular zip code (geographic), who frequently shops online (behavioral), and values sustainable products (psychographic). But layering on the fact that she buys premium products only for special occasions (occasions) and prefers brands that align with her belief in environmental responsibility (needs and emotions) gives a far richer picture of the buyer and her segment. With this, brands can create targeted campaigns that speak directly to her specific needs, emotions, and purchase motivators.
The moral of this story is simple: by embracing a holistic approach to segmentation, brands gain a comprehensive understanding of what drives consumer actions, emotions, and motivations. Each segmentation method tells a different part of the customer story, but together, they offer a complete narrative that empowers brands to connect with their audiences on a deeper, more meaningful level. Understanding this full picture allows for more personalized, resonant marketing, which in turn fosters stronger customer loyalty and drives long-term business growth.
