Anyone who has studied marketing will talk at length about the importance of market segmentation. Defining your target market, then your target group within that market, is a central part of any marketing strategy, since it drives decisions about product, location, price, promotion and everything else.
The people who love segmentation most of all are advertising experts. It is their creative enabler. Once they can picture a potential buyer, they can shape campaigns to appeal to him or her. That is how they win awards. Sometimes it even helps to sell products, though advertisers are notoriously vague about anything to do with financial results.
Segmentation is why many of us stare at the TV and fail to understand why anyone would ever buy anything on the basis of most commercials we see. WE are in the wrong segment, so the advertisers do not care. You notice the effect most when you are watching programs that you might not usually watch, because typically your segment for watching overlaps with your segment for choosing merchandise. So when I watch sports, I can at least understand all the many macho adverts for cars, even if I am not really attracted. But if I end up watching a gossipy movie for young people, I usually don’t even understand what is going on in the commercials.
I had mixed experience with segmentation in my Shell career. At some point I became in charge, temporarily, of all the marketing specialists in Europe for petrol stations, and they wasted no time in showing off their segmentation of European motorists. In a way it was impressive: they had five segments, and I could picture each one and see how driving and petrol buying might differ between them. They had beautiful videos as well – marketing types are very good at spending other people’s money.
But then I couldn’t make the next step. I thought of the types of locations for petrol stations, and felt most of them would need to attract people from all the segments, because petrol buying is so dominated by location. The marketers weren’t used to this sort of challenge, and nothing happened.
Now I look back, there probably was a middle ground. We might have been able to do things in locations with certain characteristics to target one group, without buyers in the other groups noticing or caring. We might have become a brand that one group associated positively, without any negative results for how the other groups felt about us. I wish I had not been so dismissive.
So segmentation is messy, but potentially valuable if you can find nuggets in the mess. Not all sports viewers want to rush out and buy a massive truck because of a film of one driving into the sunset driven by a cowboy accompanied by a deep bass voiceover. But maybe quite a few people who really would be attracted by that ad spend time watching sports.
I wish the marketing people spent longer understanding the mess. The way segmentation is taught fits the Harry Potter model, where everyone fits neatly into an ideal number of almost equal sized groups, and your group works for multiple situations. Real life is more complicated.
This applies also to political segmentation, trying to divine which types of people are inclined to vote for which party (if they vote at all). And there has been a boom in political segmentation, for at least three reasons. Politics has money behind it now, and targeting strategies can be more focused (partly thanks to social media). But the main reason is that traditional segmentations re breaking down, and political marketers are desperate to define new ones.
Growing up in England, the division was clear. The left were for working class people, those whose families had previously been exploited and who relied on unions, as well as newly inclusive welfare, health and education policies. The right was for those who valued the establishment, perhaps because that establishment offered their families continuing benefits.
I was told as a child that anyone not voting left in their youth had no heart, but anyone not voting right as a mature adult had no head. At the time there was some sense to this, as the left went through a phase of fighting against markets and growth, factors gradually pulling up global living standards.
I am not sure I would have drifted right even in this environment. But Thatcher put markets and selfishness on turbocharge, and that started a shift. After a time, my heart and my head both drifted leftwards, and that trend remains. The right replaced its natural voters like I might have become with others, often those who had won security and wanted to protect it against perceived threats like foreigners. Something similar happened in the US, with the civil rights movement a turning point.
Now these trends seem to have turned the world almost full circle, with less educated people tending to vote right and younger people in cities veering left. The polling and political establishment have been confused, and tried to define new segments.
Their problem has been that they have struggled to understand the new right, mainly because they struggle to respect them. It is true that many of the leaders of the new right have been shameless, and that their policies, such as they are, do nothing to benefit their voters. But those voters are angry – they are happy to continue losing, so long as the elites they despise start losing too.
This lack of respect shows through in the names given by pundits for new segments. They point to optimist versus pessimist, open versus closed, or tolerant versus resentful. Bagehot even tried exam failures versus exam passers, not his finest hour. All the segmentations are pejorative, and that inhibits understanding and responding. The best the elite can muster is condescension, re-education and charity, which only serve to grow the anger.
I have come up with an alternative, nimble versus rooted. The nimble look for opportunity in change and are ready to take risks. The rooted value and protect what they have, including tradition, and tend to see threats.
New York and Dubai are full of nimble people, while Scranton and Hartlepool have more rooted souls. The nimble move more, and select places of opportunity, which becomes self-fulfilling because nimble groups create things. The threats that the rooted fear often become reality, which serves to strengthen rooted beliefs.
The difference in my segmentation is that I don’t think is pejorative to the rooted. Many rooted values are generally positive, such as community, family, faith, or pride. Nimble cities can lack many of these virtues. And, most important, most of us don’t choose to become nimble or rooted, but are inclined to one or the other by our circumstances.
If your education has been limited by where you were born or your gender, you are likely to be rooted. If you have a handicapped child or sibling or a frail elderly relative to care for and no spare funds to pay for help, you are very likely to be rooted. If you live in subsidized housing in a town where your job has vanished and your skills have little value, you are likely to be rooted. And in each case it is less a failure than a product of circumstance.
For progressives to win back the votes of the rooted, the starting point should be understanding why they are rooted and articulating policies to address the root causes. Needless to say, lectures about racism and LGBTQ rights from distant coasts are not the smartest place to start, still less wilfully casting aside tens of thousands of Amazon jobs. Even climate policies feel like an elite luxury to many rooted.
True, progressives are more likely to push for place-based policies, for healthcare and education and childcare support for all, or for retraining. But these are easily drowned out by nostalgic or nationalistic pleas, especially when these feel closer to home.
Segmentation is powerful. But, just like for my old experts at Shell, it needs to be made relevant and a bit messy before it can do more good than harm. Open versus closed only judges and feeds a lose-lose anti-elite mentality. Fascists and con men know how to exploit that situation.
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