Experience Segmentation
Where Psychology Meets Market Segmentation
Enable experience designers to meet the subconscious emotional needs of customers.
The marketplace is defined by supply and demand, but not all consumers are created alike. Consumers often demand the same product for different reasons. To this end, customers are frequently divided into segments – or discrete units – representing a submarket for a particular product or service. Traditionally, marketing experts have used geography, demographics, or behavioral as the basis to segment customers.
Each of these bases has its advantages—yet none of them consider the quality of emotional engagement a group of consumers seeks from a firm. Emotional segmentation, a type of psychographic segmentation, specifically sets out with the goal of dividing consumers by their subconscious needs (as opposed to geography, demographics, or behavioral traits). In other words, emotional segmentation groups customers according to how they process the emotional experience. The benefit of this approach is that firms have the opportunity to deliberately plan an emotionally driven experience for customers.
Emotional Segmentation answers the following types of questions:
- How do customers differ emotionally?
- How should you segment customers accordingly?
We use Emotional Signature® methodology to explore these points. Segmenting customers by the core emotions that drive business value—like trust, joy, or belonging—is an optimal way to build customer loyalty, and it arms you with the knowledge you need to design interactions with your customers that meet these emotional needs.
Experience Design
Once the Emotional Signature® method gives you a comprehensive survey of your customers’ emotional needs, we help you refine your approach to the customer relationship. Specifically, we look at the following questions:
- How do you assess your company’s “emotional experience” offering?
- What are the potential benefits from redesigning the experience you offer your customers?
