Takeaways from our webinar with Plinc on activating segmentation from insight to action.
Most segmentation projects start the same way. The research is rigorous, the segments are well defined, and the debrief lands well. Then a few months pass, and the marketing a business sends to those same customers looks almost identical to what it was sending before the project began.
It’s a pattern we see across nearly every category we work in, and it’s the reason we recently sat down with our sister company, Plinc, for a live conversation about what it actually takes to move a segmentation from insight into action. Stuart Russell, Plinc’s Chief Strategy Officer, and Graham Burton, Plinc’s CTO, joined our President, Mike Moussallem, for a session called “Activating Segmentation: From Insight to Action.” The premise was simple. A segmentation only creates commercial value once it’s connected to real data, measured against real behavior, and used in the moments that actually influence a customer’s decision. A few things from that conversation are worth sharing here.
Two worlds that rarely talk to each other
Attitudinal segmentation, the kind we run at Explorer, is built on needs, motivations, and psychographics. It’s often the springboard for further research: packaging decisions, innovation work, media strategy. First-party data segmentation, which is Plinc’s territory, usually starts with transactional value, meaning who spends the most, and extends into behavior, such as what channels a customer engages with or what they browse but don’t buy, before eventually moving into prediction, or what a customer is likely to do next.
Both approaches have real strengths, and both have a blind spot. Attitudinal segmentation explains the why behind a decision but can be hard to scale across an entire customer base. First-party segmentation scales easily but often can’t tell a marketer what message to send or why a customer would respond to it. As Mike put it during the session, the opportunity sits in connecting the two: using rich motivational data to inform the messaging, and first-party data to make sure that messaging reaches the right customer at the right moment.
Where it tends to break down
The gap rarely comes from weak research. It comes from the handoff. Loyalty and CRM teams are often not in the room when a segmentation project is scoped, so the questions and data connections that would make activation possible never get built in from the start. Stuart shared an example from earlier in his career: a data science team built a highly accurate model predicting which customers were about to lapse, but the marketing team receiving those predictions had no clear sense of what to actually say to them. The insight was there. The bridge to activation wasn’t.
Two practical starting points
Graham walked through two ways brands are closing that gap today. The first, retrofitting, works when a segmentation already exists. A sample of known customers is surveyed and run through the existing segmentation model, and machine learning is then used to predict which segment every other customer most likely falls into, with a confidence score attached so marketers know how far to trust each prediction before acting on it.
The second approach starts earlier. First-party data is used to shape the research itself before a single survey goes out, so the resulting segmentation is built to scale from day one. Graham shared an example of a retailer that ran this approach and, almost as a side finding, discovered an entire customer segment it wasn’t reaching at all. The research explained why: a gap in the product range. The retailer went on to acquire a business to close it.
Keeping segmentation alive
The clearest theme across the hour was that segmentation stops delivering value the moment it’s treated as a one-time deliverable. The organizations getting the most out of their segments treat them as living and evolving: bringing CRM and activation stakeholders into the process early, building governance so findings actually reach the people running campaigns, and revisiting segment definitions as customer behavior and market conditions shift, rather than waiting for the next multi-year refresh.
If you have a segmentation that’s currently sitting in a slide deck rather than shaping day-to-day marketing decisions, this conversation is worth an hour of your time. Watch the full session here, or drop us a line and we’re happy to talk through where the opportunity might sit for your organization.
