You're Wasting Your Research
What happens after the interviews are done?
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:Customer segmentation divides a broad market into smaller groups that share similar characteristics, so a company can decide who it serves and how. The common approaches sort customers by demographics, geography, psychographics, behavior, or, for B2B companies, firmographics. Each of those describes who customers are and how they act without explaining why they choose what they choose. Needs-based segmentation answers that question by grouping people according to the jobs they are trying to get done and the outcomes they value. Personas then turn a segment into a specific person with a name, a situation, and a stated job, which gives a team something concrete to design and market against.In last week’s article we covered how to actually research your customers, moving between interviews and surveys until patterns start to surface. But that’s just the first step. If you run the interviews, field the survey, build the deck, and then the deck goes into a folder that nobody opens again, you’re wasting your research. Research only counts if it changes a decision, and the first decision it should change is who you are actually trying to serve.
Segment Your Customers
By combining qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys, you gather a better picture of how customers think and what they value. The next step is to organize those insights into a structure that helps you make decisions. This is where customer segmentation comes in.
Customer segmentation is the practice of dividing a broad market into smaller groups of people or organizations that share similar characteristics. The purpose is to better understand customers, identify meaningful differences between them, and decide which groups to prioritize. Segmentation helps you decide who you are trying to serve and how you will serve them.
Practically, segmentation is about identifying the differences that influence buying decisions and using those insights to guide your company’s strategies. A good segmentation creates clarity. It tells your marketing team where to focus messages, your product team what to build, and your sales team which opportunities to pursue. Without it, you risk spreading resources too thin or chasing the wrong customers altogether.
There are several common approaches to segmentation:
Demographic segmentation groups customers by observable attributes, such as age, gender, income, or education.
Geographic segmentation groups customers by location, such as city, region, or climate.
Psychographic segmentation focuses on values, beliefs, interests, and lifestyle.
Behavioral segmentation looks at actions, such as purchase frequency, product usage, or channel preference.
For business-to-business (B2B) companies, the equivalent is firmographic segmentation, which categorizes companies by industry, size, location, or legal structure.
These categories can be very useful. They help you tailor messaging, choose advertising channels, and adapt creative assets to resonate with specific audiences. Behavioral segmentation is especially helpful in the later stages of the funnel, such as for remarketing strategies. However, while these approaches tell you who your customers are and how they act, they do not explain why they make the choices they do.
Instead, the most strategic approach is needs-based segmentation, which puts the Jobs to Be Done philosophy into practice. Rather than grouping customers by what they look like or how they behave, you group them by the jobs they are trying to accomplish and the outcomes they value.
Two people with the same demographics may fall into very different segments: One might buy a car for safety, while another seeks performance. The same is true if your customers are businesses. Two companies with identical firmographics, with the same size, industry, and location, can have very different priorities. One may be focused on cutting costs, while another is investing to expand into new markets. Needs-based segmentation highlights the core issue that matters most strategically: understanding the why behind customer decisions.
To uncover your customer segments, iteration is valuable, but you don’t need endless rounds of research to align on something useful. Running the qual-quant feedback loop of interview-then-survey just once or twice is typically enough to reveal which needs matter most and how they differ across groups.
In an ideal world, you would map every possible segment in your industry before choosing a primary target segment that you can understand deeply and serve exceptionally well; however, if your time or budget is limited, interviewing your current customers is still a good place to begin. While not anonymous, these conversations can surface valuable insights and point you toward the dimensions that matter most to them.
Create Customer Personas
Once your customer segments are defined, what do you do with them? Some brands will use a needs-based segmentation to simply create a scientific data sheet of needs and market opportunity. However, one way to bring all this data to life is through customer personas. Personas translate the raw insights of segmentation into something human and relatable while remaining data inspired. Instead of referring to “Segment 3: Homeowners Who Have Low Do-It-Yourself Confidence,” you create “Harry the Hesitant Homeowner.” A persona tells a story your team can imagine, empathize with, and design around.
And Harry is real. Or at least, his persona is. Harry comes from my work consulting with an e-commerce company that sells exterior and interior wood and fiberglass doors for residential homes.
Because we were working with a smaller research budget, typical of companies with annual revenues under $50 million, we did not complete the full qual-quant feedback loop of customer research. Instead, I conducted internal staff interviews, reviewed market research, gathered insights from selling partners, and analyzed over a thousand customer reviews. Out of that process emerged Harry the Hesitant Homeowner, whose persona looked like this:
Demographics: Harry, age forty-two, is a middle manager at a regional insurance company in Columbus, Ohio. He is married with two children, ages nine and eleven.
Job to Be Done: Harry says, “I need a door that makes my wife happy with the way our home looks, and I need the buying and installation process to be simple enough that I don’t mess it up.”
Background: Harry and his wife have lived in their home for over a decade. While he takes pride in being a homeowner, Harry is not a natural DIYer. He would rather pay someone else, but budget concerns often push him into projects. He approaches tasks cautiously, often second-guessing himself, and dreads situations where mistakes could be costly.
Daily goals and challenges: Harry’s daily life is a balance of meeting work deadlines, managing kids’ activities, and keeping the house in order. When home projects come up, he feels pressure to step up, but he is also anxious about his lack of handyman skills. His main challenge is interpreting product details and making sure he doesn’t choose the wrong thing, because redoing a project is his worst nightmare.
Shopping influences: Harry’s wife drives most of the inspiration, pulling ideas from Pinterest, Instagram, and what friends are doing in their homes. Harry himself relies more on reviews, store associates, and clear online specifications to guide him. He is motivated less by excitement about the project and more by wanting to get it right the first time.
Current need: Harry’s wife wants to upgrade their front entryway to boost curb appeal. Harry’s role is to do the research, compare products, and make sure they buy something that will look great and last. For him, the pressure isn’t about whether they should get a new door. It’s about making sure he doesn’t screw it up when buying and installing.
Shopping preferences: Harry shops online first, comparing options from Home Depot, brand websites, and Google search results. He wants straightforward, reliable information with plenty of photos so he can show his wife the specific options. He avoids customization complexity and wants a simple path to order. If needed, he’ll go to a store to confirm details, but his preference is an easy, guided digital experience.
Decision-making process: Harry does the legwork, such as researching doors, calling for quotes, and checking specs. But the final decision rests with his wife, who initiated the project and must approve the option he presents. Once she’s satisfied with the look, Harry will execute the order and attempt the install, even though he knows he may be in over his head. His hesitancy is about ability, not desire; he wants to deliver on his wife’s vision without letting it become the source of another weekend headache.
Personas like Harry the Hesitant Homeowner are powerful because they turn abstract research into a living story your team can rally around. They put a face and a voice to your data, making it easier for designers, marketers, and executives to imagine the customer’s real concerns and aspirations. When your team refers to Harry rather than Segment 3, you build empathy, alignment, and creativity in how you solve their problems. That human connection transforms research from numbers on a page into a practical tool for decision-making and customer-centered growth.
Wrapping It All Up
Research that stays in a report is money spent on nothing. Segmentation turns findings into a choice about who you serve. Personas make that group specific enough to design for. Moving from “Segment 3” to Harry, who is forty-two and afraid of ruining his own front door, makes the existing information more usable, because a team can picture Harry and make choices based on what he would actually do.
Find the last piece of customer research your company paid for. Can you point to a single decision that came out of it?
Interested in more?
This article’s content was adapted from the book Keeping People Interested: How Leaders Use Marketing to Capture and Sustain Attention, available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook today.
