When you want to be successful, you’ll always have to focus on just one or two focus groups, in order to respond to their desires and needs. But how do you define these focus groups?
In this series of blog articles, marketing professional Edwin van der Woude from Het Regiobureau will take you on a journey to the world of focus groups. He’ll show us what we can learn from the leisure and travel industry. The first blog of this series focused on the importance of knowing your target audience for your strategy. This second blog will focus on defining these focus groups.
Demographic data is no longer enough
Segmentation based on demographics hasn’t been sufficient for a while now. Take, for example, prince Charles and Ozzy Osbourne. They have identical demographics: born in 1948, raised in Great Britain, married two times, two kids, successful, and rich. Will they have the same needs? No, of course not. Their values, which are the foundation of their behavior, are totally different. So neither their age, social status, nor amount of kids they have determine their behavior. Their values do. And that’s what you have to focus on when segmenting and defining your target groups.
But how do you classify the whole population, based on their values or motivations? We show you two models, devised by renowned agencies, that segment on values.These are Motivaction’s Mentality model, and SAMR’s BSR model. In order to explain how these models work, we first show you some necessary theory.
Motivaction’s Mentality model: status vs change
The Mentality model classifies humanity based on how much they value status (vertical axis), and if they are more conservative or progressive: do they prefer the way it is now ,or do they like change? Based on these values, Motivaction has defined eight social environments. These segments - and the extent to which they occur in the Netherlands - are shown in the figure below.
BSR model: psychology vs sociology
Another great model for segmentation is SAMR’s BSR model. This model classifies the population based on a psychological axis and a sociological axis. To make this understandable, these axis show if someone is more extroverted or introverted, and if someone is more egocentric or group-oriented. The figure below shows that this classification shows four quadrants: vitality, harmony, control, and security. These quadrants are the foundation for segmentation.
In this blog, we showed you that selecting and defining your target audience based on their age, their family, and such isn’t very effective. Lifestyle segmentation, based on values, is way better. And we have models that help you with that: the Mentality model and the BSR model. Because we have a lot of experience with the travel industry, we tell you how these models are used in this industry.
