Once we know something, it becomes hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.
More quotesMeet Karen, a composite “premium quality seeker”. Karen buys fancy coffee beans, supermarket washing-up liquid, the cheapest petrol visible when the warning light comes on, and an absurdly expensive candle because a friend is visiting. By Tuesday the persona deck has reported her to HR for inconsistency.
Karen is behaving perfectly normally. The daft bit is our need to turn a changing human into a stable PowerPoint character. I have never met anyone who is uniformly price-sensitive, loyal, adventurous or ethical across every purchase. People splurge where they care, economise where they do not, abandon principles when hurried, and buy the available option when the preferred one is missing. Calling this a segmentation failure mistakes ordinary Tuesday for faulty data.
Software buyers behave no better. A firm will haggle over £8 a month for an incidental tool, then pay handsomely for the system that stops payroll becoming an emergency. A privacy-conscious person clicks the convenient default at an airport. A supposed brand loyalist tries a rival during a stockout, then wanders back next week without writing a breakup letter.
Segmentation gets more honest when it describes occasions before pretending to describe souls. What job is happening? How urgent is it? Who else is watching? What is easy to buy now? Which compromise feels harmless in this moment? Stable market totals can conceal millions of people changing their minds underneath. The customer refuses to stand still like a marble statue labelled “Value Seeker”. They are weather. Market accordingly.