Tag: best practices

Pointers on Behavioral Segmentation

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Behavioral segmentation is the practice of segmenting your customers based on what they do. I wrote previously about the basics of behavioral segmentation. During the last year, I’ve been putting it into practice through a customer segmentation project with a CASC business partner. Today I’d like to share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned through that experience.

NOT Just an Analytics Exercise

Behavioral segmentation has the advantage of revealing segments of similarly behaved consumers that you may not have thought of previously. It requires a lot of data crunching. There is no doubt about that. However, it is important to remember that behavioral segmentation is not entirely an exercise in numbers. If data crunching is all that you do, you risk creating segments that either are based on artificial or fake relationships or are not very actionable from a target marketing perspective.

Successful behavioral segmentation should be a collaborative exercise between your analytics team and those who have a good grasp of your business and your customers. The latter are most likely found in your marketing or sales department. The process of behavioral segmentation should be developed as an iterative process that goes back and forth between analytics and marketing. The analytics team should start by understanding from the marketing team the purpose of the segmentation exercise, the observed behaviors at hand, and the capability of marketing to implement behavioral segmentation insights. Based on this initial information, the analytics team can produce an initial set of behavioral segments based on customer data.

This initial segmentation scheme should be presented to the marketing team both to make sense of the results and to see if meaningful actions can be taken to target each segment. The input from the marketing team is then fed back to the next round of data crunching to adjust the segmentation focus and approach. This process is repeated until both sides are satisfied with a meaningful set of segments to be implemented in practice.

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Social Media Showdown

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As I mentioned in the last post, the MBA students in my Internet Marketing class this semester completed a social media project. In the project, they observed the social media efforts of two competing companies over the course of three consecutive weeks. It is not possible to repeat all the 20-page reports in a blog post, but I thought it may be fun for you to see which company within each pair was considered to be better. By better, I don’t mean what the companies have but instead what the companies do. In other words, we don’t use the sheer number of followers, fans, etc. as the judging criterion, as that can be easily skewed by the company’s existing market position. Instead, better is defined in the sense that the winning company is doing a better job interacting with and engaging consumers through these social media channels. In most cases, the social media channels observed were three of the following: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and company blog.

Before getting to the results, I’d like to thank the 21 students who put their hard work into the project and made this information possible. You guys/gals rock!

Now are you ready to see who won the showdown? Here you go!

IndustryOpponent 1Opponent 2Winner
AirlineDeltaAeroflotDelta (barely)
AutomobileAudiLexusAudi
AutomobileHondaToyotaToyota
CameraCannonNikonCanon
EntertainmentTiestoDavid GuettaTiesto
EntertainmentThe Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC)Bellator Fighting ChampionshipUFC
FinancialTradeKingE*TradeE*Trade Baby
Food & BeveragesPizza HutDomino'sDomino's
Food & BeveragesPanera BreadSchlotzsky_sPanera Bread
Food & BeveragesRed BullMonster EnergyRed Bull
Food & BeveragesStarbucksGreen Mountain CoffeeTie
HealthWeightWatchersJenny CraigWeightWatchers
ITMicrosoftGoogleGoogle
ITNVidiaAMDNVidia
MediaMartha Steward WeddingThe KnotTie
Non-ProfitSaddleback ChurchFellowship ChurchSaddleback Church
Online ServiceMatch.comeHarmonyeHarmony
Online ServiceLiving SocialGrouponGroupon
SportsBillabongOneill'sTie
SportsNikeUnder ArmourNike, though both are doing a good job
SportsNFLMLBTie

Do you agree with the students’ observations? Please tell us what you think!

Best Practices — Old Spice Marketing Campaign

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This year is a good year for Old Spice. Starting with the “Smell Like a Man, Man campaign” followed by the successful Old Spice Man viral videos, the once quiet brand is now stirring up plenty of buzz among marketers and consumers alike. When I went to the Society for New Communications Research 5th Research Symposium earlier this month, I attended a session where Old Spice brand manager James Moorhead told the stories behind the recent marketing success. In this blog, I’d like to share some of what I learned with you.

Campaign Summary

The Old Spice marketing campaign is called “Smell Like a Man, Man”. So far, the campaign has gone through three phases:

Phase 1: Launched around the Superbowl time, it uses humorous vignettes featuring a sexy man to convey the brand’s role in the journey from a young man to full manhood. During that same time period, Dove was planning to launch a competing new men’s personal care product line Dove Men+Care on Superbowl. But Old Spice decided to launch its campaign “around” Superbowl rather than on Superbowl for cost efficiency and proper audience reach (more on that later). Below is a commercial from this phase.

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