Knowing Our Audience: Business Leaders Need Better Tools and Techniques to Connect with Consumers

Segmentation and communication are two important areas to consider when exploring the relationships between businesses and customers. In contemporary marketing practice, the customer experience is informed by past and present message communication and past and present experiences combined to forming the underlying relationship. Marketing effectiveness depends on the ability to understand the expectations and experiences of the various audience segments. Segmentation spans the range from basic product segmentation, demographic segmentation, and psychographic segmentation to more complex needs-based segmentation and values-based segmentation that are based on consumer perspectives. Means-end chain theory provides a sophisticated framework for exploring attributes, needs and values by creating a link between tangible attributes and the individual and societal needs of consumers including benefits and values. After grouping consumers according to different characteristics, the next step is to think about the nature of communication between businesses and consumers. Traditional one-way communication models, such as AIDA (attention-interest-desire-action), remained essentially unchallenged into the 1990s until questions about market validation began to surface. Contemporary communication models such as Meyers-Levy and Malaviya’s integrative framework for persuasion and judgment formation, the Memory-Affect-Cognition model and the Perception-Experience-Memory model integrate multidisciplinary contemporary thinking on how the mind works when processing information including. The result of the development of these contemporary models is a better understanding of how consumers think and feel. This, in turn, can build upon more sophisticated tools used to segment consumers.