Check The Rhyme: Segmentation

Check it!

“Some MCs be talking and talking

Trying to show how Black people are walking

But I don't walk this way to portray

Or reinforce stereotypes of today

Like all my brothers eat chicken and watermelon

Talk broken English and drug selling “

We’re looking at a lyric from “My Philosophy,” one of my favorite hip hop records of all time, from Boogie Down Productions’ KRS-One. It's a little longer than normal, but I love this line because it challenges the conventional wisdom of marketing segmentation. Let's provide a little foundation of what I mean here.

Segmentation is an exercise that marketers undergo to inform to whom we're going to target our marketing communication efforts. That is to say, which segment are we going to go after? Which segment are we targeting?

To do this, marketers take the heterogeneous market we live in, where everyone is different, and place people into homogeneous-like clusters. That is, we place them in groups where people are more alike than they are different, based upon some particular context or criteria.

And here's where KRS-One starts to challenge the conventional wisdom of segmentation. Far too often, marketers base their segmentation efforts on demographics: age, race, gender, household income, geography, language. We use this instrument to describe people. And while it is accurate, for the most part (your age is your age, your income is your income, where you live is where you live), demography doesn't actually describe who people are.

Take my demographics for instance. I am:

• 41 years old
• African- American
• Born and raised in Detroit (What Up Doe!)
• Went to public schools my entire life

Now, if a marketer saw that on a brief, they'd say “Oh, he must walk like this, talk like this, do these things, hang out with those people, and buy these things because that's just what those kinds of people do.”

Those stats don't give rise to the fact that

• I grew up playing jazz
• I swam competitively from 6 y/o through high school
• I studied engineering
• I love to sail

These things shape how I see the world and, as a result, how I show up in the world. My worldview informs how I behave, which means that demography does not do an accurate job of describing who people really are. When we segment based on demographics, we find ourselves putting people in boxes that reflect stereotypes.

“Like all my brothers eat chicken and watermelon Talk broken English and drug selling”

This doesn't represent all black people! There are a ton of white people who eat chicken and watermelon, talk broken English, and probably sell some drugs, too. And that’s what KRS is getting at here. These boxes that we put people in, while easy and efficient to do such, do not accurately describe who people are.

This should be of the utmost importance to marketing practitioners. Marking's reliance on demography to describe people and construct segments leads to ill-informed targeting and marketing communications that completely misses the mark.

Thank you, KRS-One...Professor KRS-One.