Segmenting Customers by Desires, Preferences, and Current and Aspirational Lifestyle Elements
- The AHA Group
- Apr 9
- 2 min read
Using age, spend, and demographic data to segment customers is very primitive. Yet, it’s still common place in lots of industries.
If you want to capture and retain customers, or convert them from your competitors, you have to understand what drives them and you have to be able to use this information to look like you organically KNOW them.
Segmenting customers by desires, preferences, and current and aspirational lifestyle elements is a much more powerful tool.
Especially if you want to craft experiences that naturally impress and captivate your target customers.
This is a great place to deploy AI as a data aggregator and trend identifier that can uncover customer views and lifestyle elements you can weave into your customer segmentation strategy.
Jones Road, Bobbi Brown’s latest make-up line, is doing just that with their newest foundation launch. A new foundation launch is always going to be a highly competitive undertaking because you must get customers to switch or try your new product. And the market is always saturated. Instead of targeting “over 50” or “mature skin” or “Gen Z”, they used AI to scrape the internet for customer insights from reviews and interactions across Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and other social platforms. They used this to form Five personas that would be their target customer, and-- *newsflash*-- none of them were based on traditional segmentation - like age or spend.
Instead, they focused on desires, dislikes, and new preferences - and then linked those to lifestyle elements. This led to considerations like: a foundation that will survive a workout or a school run, can be applied with fingers and has travel friendly packaging, etc. All opportunities to make their product offering stand out in a sea of competitors - by looking “organically” right for these customers at a deeper level.
The next step is crafting experiences that truly speak to the WOW moments that will make this product uniquely personal and special for each consumer. That’s a new frontier for make-up and skincare because until now, most of the work in this segment stops at the product!
The Product is NOT the experience, and that’s a misconception I see all the time across all industries. The produce is the tangible good that must deliver on the product promise. The experience is the deeper connection that bonds the customer to the brand.