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BY PIET LEVY//STAFF WRITER

minutes with
Senior vice president of Copernicus Marketing Consulting

Eric Paquette

plevy@ama.org

The explosion of digital technology and digital consumer segments brings new concerns for market segmentation research, says Eric Paquette, senior vice president of Copernicus Marketing Consulting, a Boston-based rm with clients such as Procter & Gamble, ExxonMobil, and Michelin. Hours after giving a presentation titled Market Segmentation for the Digital Age at the AMAs Marketing Research Conference in Atlanta in September, Paquette sat down with Marketing News to discuss three digitalspecic segmentation considerations and why theyre important.
Q: How do you think the digital evolution has made segmentation easier and how has it made it harder? A: Im not sure that it makes it easier or harder, necessarily. It just changes some of the things we need to worry about. Weve always said you need to worry about three things with segmentation: You need to make sure that the segments are different in terms of their prot potential to you so [that] when youre done, you can identify a clear target for your brands. You want to be sure that the segments provide clear guidance on the needs and wants and motivations of that target so you can develop clear positioning and messaging strategies. And you also want to be able to nd those targets with media after the fact. Those things all still hold true, but now some of the things that we need to worry about are different. You need to pay more attention to brand advocates and making sure that theyre a signi cant part in your target segment simply because the role of brand advocacy is much bigger now than it ever was before. eir scale of reach and the speed with which they can reach lots of di erent people has increased dramatically. Second, you need to know what kind of behaviors your target audience engages in when theyre online. ... You have people on one end of the spectrum that you can call authors, people who are writing their own blogs, creating their own content, generating their own Web pages. e marketing strategies that youd engage against that audience would be very di erent than [with] a group of folks who

are more like connectors, who just want to get [online] and be with other people like them, or people who are spectators who just like to get on and look at all the information that other people may be creating. You need to understand how your target aligns across those behaviors so you can understand what you should be doing digitally to nd them. Much more of the marketing process now is in places where people are trying to engage and learn about you. Understanding how theyre trying to nd you, whether thats with search terms, or how theyre trying to research your product or research your category, are all things [that] we need to worry about much more so now than we ever did before. For the people who practice marketing segmentation its not all that di erent. We still have a questionnaire that were going to expose to some number of our target consumers. One of the things I would encourage is just to be sure youre engaging the advertising and media planning agencies. Ask them what the questions [are] that they would like to know about their targets so you make sure you are providing them with the information they may want.
Q: Why is it important for market researchers to identify brand advocates when conducting online segmentation? What measurements should they use? A: Some people get tripped up with the idea of advocates being heavy users and one thing we would say is your advocates typically are heavy users, but you can

also typically nd other people in terms of their regular usage behavior who look a lot like them. [At] a restaurant youll nd your advocates are visiting you on a weekly basis; youll nd lots of other people are also visiting you on a weekly basis. We need to know more than just their usage behavior. We need to know that they actually really love you. Measures [from] attitudinal types of statements o entimes work. We want to measure both the intensity of their a ection for the brand and also their interest in telling other people about the brand. ere are people who love you and are perfectly happy to keep that fact a secret. ere are other people who love to go and tell their friends about you, so [we have to make] sure we have questions addressing both of those dimensions. And the third thing, actually, that we care about is their reach. How many people can they reach and how quickly? How many Facebook friends do they have? Are they on Twitter and how many Twitter followers do they have? Are they bloggers? Somebody who loves you and only talks to a few people is less valuable than somebody who loves you and talks to 1,000 people.
Q: You mentioned how its important to understand how your target behaves in the digital environment. Elaborate on how to accomplish this and what to look for. A: The idea is understanding what it is that they are doing online, so how frequently are they doing things like writing blogs? How frequently are they creating their own Web

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pages or Web page content? How frequently are they on social networks? How frequently are they commenting about things that they saw in other spaces? Its simply a matter of asking the types of questions about those online behaviors to provide you [with] an understanding of how your target breaks down along those behavioral dimensions. Your digital strategies are going to be very different if youve got a high percentage of authors as opposed to spectators, for instance. If you have a bunch of people who just want to look at information you certainly dont want to be developing digital strategies that are trying to get them to create new content. And then, sort of the evil opposite side, if you have a group that is a bunch of authors, then there are lots of things you want to do to try to engage them. You want to provide them the information that they want to know about you so they can tell people about you. You are now much more interested in seeding them with content, and providing them with the tools and the means to post their opinions and post their thoughts.
Q: You also said its crucial to understand how the target tries to find you. Why is that important for digital segmentation? Once youve figured out how theyre finding you, how should that impact your marketing? A: This is one of those areas where the world has changed pretty significantly from the old advertising strategy where we find our target and broadcast our message to them. Digital technologies provide [people with] dramatically more control about how they go about learning about you whether theyre finding that information out from you or finding it out from other users, whether theyre looking on blogs, whether theyre looking on social networks, whether theyre looking on YouTube. Its critical to understand how it is that they are going to try and find you; what theyre trying to learn from you when theyre trying to find you; [and] where they might be in their purchase cycle. Are they people who are doing initial research on their computer, in which case [youre] providing them

information about your website? If there are people who are trying to get information about you at the point of purchase [and] theyre standing there with their iPhones in their hands and trying to learn something quickly, obviously what you need to be providing them [with at that point] might be very different. From a nuts-and-bolts kind of search perspective, if they are using particular

search terms, you want to make sure that you understand what those are so that you can be optimizing your search strategies. People who are more innovators or in an advanced group are going to use different search terms in a category than people who are less so. Having that information available so you can tailor your search strategies more effectively is a very useful tool. m

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