Attitudinal segmentation helps you see your business through your clients’ eyes.
Knowing how your clients think and feel is a strong competitive advantage. Your industry might be defined as B2B, but all communication is very much person-to-person. By grouping individuals by their attitudes – not just their demographics and buyer behaviors – you can create more nuanced messaging that has a more meaningful impact.
What is attitudinal segmentation?
Attitudinal segmentation is a way of sorting your clients into target groups based on their shared attitudes. Discovering your clients’ opinions helps you make stronger emotional connections with these different groups within your target markets.
The results are often very revealing. You’ll see individuals within the same demographics, and even buying behavior, that express polarized attitudes. Uncovering individuals’ thoughts and emotions gives you deeper insights that help with business decisions about product or service development, marketing strategy, advertising campaigns, and company-wide client communications.
Listening to what individuals think and feel about pertinent issues, gives you the understanding to power strong relationships that grow together.
When to use attitudinal segmentation?
Attitudinal segmentation proves particularly useful for businesses when they seek in-depth insights into their target audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and preferences. This research method is essential in the following scenarios:
- Understanding Customer Motivations: Attitudinal segmentation helps businesses grasp the underlying motivations and drivers influencing customer decisions. This knowledge enables companies to tailor marketing strategies that emotionally resonate with their audience, leading to increased engagement and brand loyalty.
- Persona-Based Marketing: By creating detailed buyer personas based on shared attitudes, values, and behaviors, businesses can develop more personalized and effective marketing campaigns. Understanding these personas empowers companies to address specific customer needs with targeted messaging.
- Improving Customer Experience: Attitudinal segmentation assists in evaluating customer satisfaction and gauging their overall experience with a brand. Identifying pain points and enhancing positive aspects results in improved customer retention and a strengthened brand reputation.
- Enhancing Product Development: Uncovering customer attitudes and perceptions aids in refining product offerings based on customer preferences. By aligning products with customer desires, businesses can create better products that resonate with their target audience.
- Exploring New Market Opportunities: Attitudinal segmentation allows businesses to identify new market opportunities and untapped customer segments. Understanding the attitudes and preferences of potential customers in new markets helps tailor strategies to drive business growth.
The importance of attitudinal segmentation
Attitudinal segmentation plays a crucial role in market research and strategic decision-making for businesses. This approach goes beyond basic customer characteristics and delves into customers’ attitudes, beliefs, and motivations. The insights gained from attitudinal segmentation enable businesses to create personalized marketing strategies, refine product development, and optimize the customer experience. By understanding customer attitudes, companies can communicate more effectively, position their brand strategically, and identify new market opportunities.
What does attitudinal segmentation research look like?
The usefulness of attitudinal segmentation research hinges on the quality of the questions asked. It’s a delicate balance. They need to be open enough that individuals have the space to share their opinions. But they must also be focused on your industry and specific issues, so that the collated analysis contains actionable insights. Being handed reams of disparate data isn’t useful to anyone.
NewtonX attitudinal segmentation research combines the right research methodologies to create clusters of related questions. There’s room for your audience to express themselves within a framework that reveals clear parallels and patterns. Incorporating opportunities for these connections to become visible is what makes attitudinal segmentation research so useful.
Attitudinal segmentation questions typically look like this:
- What do you think about…?
- Why do you…?
- When you’re buying X, what’s your most important consideration?
- Which brand is best for buying…? Why?
Using Attitudinal Segmentation Successfully
The information you get from your attitudinal segmentation research needs to help you take more effective action. The insights themselves take your messaging to a deeper level, speaking to your clients’ shared emotions – not just their collective location, turnover, or past buying behavior. Now you can pluck the precise heartstring that reverberates into the thinking behind their next purchase decision.
Attitudinal segmentation research improves business outcomes when the insights are used wisely. This means:
1. It’s only part of the puzzle
Attitudinal research is part of a wider set of metrics about your existing and potential clients. Its insights should be combined with those from other segmentation research. Data about clients’ pain points, needs and demographics are all part of the wider picture.
2. There’s something for everyone
Analysis of this kind of research provides you with groupings of people who’ve given similar answers to the same set of questions. Their shared attitudes put them in the same segment together. Sharing this powerful information with everyone concerned is vital. It’s useful evidence for a targeted advertising campaign. It’s also invaluable knowledge for product innovators. Share your attitudinal research insights with all departments.
3. It’s a snapshot of an ongoing exercise
Your current data tells you what people think and feel now. Who knows how this will change in the next year? It’s robust research for making business critical decisions now. It’s worth planning how often you’re going to take the emotional temperature of your audience, so you can adapt to their attitude changes.
Attitudinal segmentation analysis
Attitudinal segmentation analysis is a powerful method used to identify distinct subgroups within a population based on their shared attitudes and beliefs. Market researchers employ multivariate analytical techniques like cluster analysis to group survey respondents with similar response patterns into specific categories or segments. These segments are characterized by common attitudes, while customers across different segments exhibit contrasting attitudes.
To conduct attitudinal segmentation analysis effectively, researchers must carefully select the relevant input variables from the survey data. Since large groups of the population are unlikely to agree on numerous attitudes, factor analysis is employed to reveal the underlying attitudes that prevail among respondents. By understanding the unique attitudinal profiles of different customer segments, businesses can tailor their marketing strategies and messaging to resonate with specific audiences, leading to more effective and targeted campaigns.
NewtonX attitudinal segmentation insights
It’s not just about asking the right questions. It’s about finding the right people to ask. The NewtonX Knowledge Graph uses AI-powered custom recruiting to find your people.
You’ll get a bird’s eye view of all your audiences’ attitudes and opinions; previous clients, various groups of current clients, and potential clients. We scan over 1.1 billion minds across 140 industries to find the exact niche professionals to answer your questions.
How a global marketing and digital strategy agency found success by embedding NewtonX insights into their marketing
A global marketing and digital strategy agency came to NewtonX to get evidence on which to base refinements to their marketing strategy. They wanted to know how C-suite decision makers choose creative agencies. In 10 days, NewtonX sourced 120 C-suite executives, in 3 different geographical markets, across 6 industries in companies making over $200m.
Our research didn’t just determine these senior decision makers’ goals, priorities and budgets. Crucial benchmarking questions were included in the survey to reveal how these experts thought and felt about the agency in comparison to a range of competitors. We delved deeper into the findings of this qualitative data by also conducting interviews with 12 expert participants.
After adapting their brand positioning and messaging to incorporate these insights, they’ve attracted new Fortune 500 companies and are on track to outperform their previous quarter’s 15% revenue.
Got your next question in mind? Get a quote today.
