Peter Pre­vos, 30 Janu­ary 2011.

It is sunny week­end in Aus­tralia and I am loun­ging in the back yard with my laptop pre­par­ing the next mar­ket­ing lec­ture. Soon I will be talk­ing with stu­dents about the core aspects of the mar­ket­ing pro­cess: segmen-tation, tar­get­ing and pos­i­tion­ing.

Mar­ket­ing is, very simply put, the pro­cess of doing things for other people, professionally.

To be able to mar­ket well it is as such extremely import­ant to know who this other per­son is and under­stand their needs and wants. In the words of my former mar­ket­ing pro­fessor Rhett Walker, you need to find out what “rattles their cage”.

Mar­ket­ing is, very simply put, the pro­cess of doing things for other people, professionally

Mar­keters mainly do this by using sim­pli­fied quant­it­at­ive mod­els of social real­ity. They like to know where cus­tom­ers live, who their cus­tom­ers are, how they pur­chase and use stuff and why they buy stuff in the first place. Like a baby play­ing with blocks, they match the seg­ments with their products and ser­vices, mak­ing sure not to put a square peg in a round hole. Selling ice to Eski­mos is clearly a case of seg­ment­a­tion gone hor­ribly wrong.

It is extremely dif­fi­cult to make sense out of the myriad of vari­ables avail­able within the four broad types of seg­ment­a­tion. But people’s drive to sim­plify the com­plex­ity of social real­ity knows no bounds. Some com­pan­ies have developed nice tools to help mar­keters to seg­ment their mar­ket in com­pre­hens­ible chunks, such as the Roy Mor­gan Val­ues Seg­ments and the VALS™ (Val­ues, Atti­tudes and Life­Styles) sys­tem. Unfor­tu­nately, these sys­tems are pro­pri­ety and it is dif­fi­cult to assess their valid­ity, but that does not dimin­ish their pop­ular­ity. You can even do the VALS™ sur­vey online and find out what your primary and sec­ond­ary type is. It only takes 39 simple ques­tions to clas­sify every human being into neat categories.

These sys­tems cer­tainly serve a pur­pose, but they can be no replace­ment for real under­stand­ing of human beings. To be a suc­cess­ful mar­keter requires soci­olo­gical ima­gin­a­tion which is the abil­ity to recog­nise rela­tion­ships between pat­terns in soci­ety and the actions of indi­vidual people. The quant­it­at­ive soci­ology of seg­ment­a­tion can not lead to under­stand­ing of people, it can only describe them. Under­stand­ing is much harder to obtain. In the words of C. Wright Mills: “neither the life of an indi­vidual nor the his­tory of a soci­ety can be under­stood without under­stand­ing both”.^1. Soci­olo­gical under­stand­ing is a qual­ity of mind, rather than ana­lys­ing a set of data. Unfortunately this type of under­stand­ing can not be sum­mar­ised in pretty dia­grams nor can it be sci­en­tific­ally tested. in stat­ist­ical mod­els. Soci­olo­gical ima­gin­a­tion is a nar­rat­ive that grows through debate and life experience.

To truly under­stand cus­tom­ers you need to look bey­ond the source of rev­enue with a mul­ti­tude of labels, but under­stand them in a qual­it­at­ive sense. You need to find out what rattles their cage.

1. C. Wright Mills (1959) Soci­olo­gical Ima­gin­a­tion. Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press, Lon­don. [↩]