In Customer Experience Work, Segmentation or Personas?

Segmentation divides a large, aggregate, and seemingly homogeneous marketplace into clearly and quantitatively defined groups of buyers.  Customer needs or desires, ability to buy, and locations are some of the variables that can be used to segment a market. More advanced models include detailed psychographic variables like lifestyle and values. Segmentation is a quantitative breakdown of a market.

Segmentation work is something often done to help answer the question: Who do we serve?  Sometimes referred to as a way to “divide the market in order to conquer it,” segmentation helps a business decide which groups to target with what products and services, and how to reach them. Segments help businesses win.  

Personas are a set of fictional individual archetypes of the target consumer. They are representative individuals, not “averages” of any group or segment. Informed by qualitative research, personas bring an individual’s goals, motivations and behaviors to life. Personas are a qualitative analysis of customer behavior.

Why have personas?  Personas guide the design of any product or service experience. They allow business leaders to step into an individual customer’s point of view, using their motivations, usage habits, and goals as a litmus test for decisions about design or how customers will use or experience a product or service. Personas help leaders help consumers win.

Our answer to “In customer experience work, do you use segmentation or personas?” is it depends. We create a single target customer by leveraging any work already performed – be it segments or personas. 

The target customer in an ideal customer experience is a composite character, made up of the demographic, behavior and attitudinal characteristics shared by the customers that drive growth and sustainability for a business. The target customer is informed by quantitative data and a meta synthesis of existing voice of customer and performance data.  The target customer exists in some portion of all of the target segments a business chooses.   The target customer is broad enough to include all segments and personas.

Customer experience is an operating strategy – the “how we will deliver value” section of a company’s playbook. For this reason, two things — a clearly defined target customer and the need a company can solve for them better than anyone else – are fundamental ingredients to every decision a company makes to design and execute a customer experience.   After all, every experience starts with a person, who has a problem or need they would trade something of value to have solved.