Week 1: Cultural Segmentation
CULTURAL SEGMENTATION: PROMPTS AND PRACTICES
It’s easy to create data-driven cultural segments
We live among so much publicly available data right now, you can develop a data-driven perspective on your next best customer, looking through repeat brand engaged profiles.
If you live in the luxurious world of having a data science or research team, these are great prompts to create consensus and direction to launch a faster, more successful campaign than ever.
That’s not hyperbole: if the result of any of these practices makes it to market, experience says everyone will be high-fiving much lower CPM, and fast, more sustainable revenue.
Warning: if you’re working in a large business environment, you should expect blowback by asking to do things like talk directly to customers. It’s going to upset people for a million weird and unpredictable reasons.
The reason you will get most often is that it doesn’t represent a business segment or existing method. This is when, in conversation, you must gain alignment that if your campaign does nothing except get more best customers, that’s OK. Which is a weird thing to type and to say out loud, but it’s actually a huge upheld myth conflating business rules and objectives as meaningful to consumer decision making.
Talk to one great customer for 30 minutes
Ask them to tell you the story of what life was like before your product, how they made the decision to buy, and how they’ve introduced new people to the product.
Also ask them what sports they watch in their free time, streaming shows, songs they’re listening to, and restaurants they feel like are a special weekly or monthly treat.
That transcript will offer you a million times better insight into how decision making moments occur, and the way your best customer frames their own action in those critical times; you will instantly have data that tells you the attitudes you need to align with at a moment of need.
If you don’t have a customer you can reach out to, take 30 minutes on calendar to interview yourself or your team as if you were a customer answering that question.
Yeah IK, it sounds silly, but trust me, you’ll have more than you need to create digital sequences for your next great customer.
Cast your campaign for cultural relevance
Who is the hero of your product buying story? What is their world like? What was their world like before your brand? What is the destination they can’t help but imagine? What’s a new idea they’ve recently, successfully made a habit?
Who is their mentor that helps them cross the threshold into this new world with your product?
Who are the hero’s allies in navigating the new world using your product?
How does your product make the hero stronger from within? What new abilities do they gain? How do they feel and what will they do differently with the people they care about after they’ve reached their goal?
Some people may say you need to talk to more people for your findings to be statistically valid. The truth is that you do not. You just need one, because you’re filtering that story through the experience of the team around you.
The data you get out of one conversation is worth exponentially more than zero. We’re not solving for scientific perfection: we’re just trying to understand how one great customer acts. Because if we can demonstrate those behaviors in marketing, anyone who identifies with that action, and is highly motivated, will perform that action.
Empathy Mapping and HIIT
Can you offer a practical tip on how to solve dynamic problem spaces without mentioning Empathy Mapping and HIIT? They will help us see the intersection between the lives of our customer, and what the brand has to offer in making their life better.
First, fill out this empathy map for your customer as they are buying your product or service.
The HIIT: take the top five most resonant ideas from the empathy map and place them along a vertical axis. Then, write your top five business goals or features and benefits across the horizontal axis at the top.
Now you’ve got a rubric. Set a timer for ten minutes and fill in the intersections between what’s happening in the life of your customer and what your brand needs them to do in that moment. Again, you will initially come up with ridiculous ideas. But stay until the end of the ten minutes and you will have found a handful of excellent ways to anchor new behaviors within existing routines.
Let’s do one together.
Zoom on Thursday,
September 11 2025
4pm london
11am eastern
10am central
8am pacific
Bring your problems and let’s talk through how cultural segmentation works in your work.
