Audience Needs Segmentation
A strategic springboard for growth
Seismic shifts in the way we live our lives coupled with tech advances has created a huge opportunity for digital-first brands. What sets apart the brands that endure from those that are forgotten?
Success is founded upon a human-centred approach to design powered by research that delivers both robust data on opportunities and empathy with consumer goals, motivations and frustrations.
A successful needs-based segmentation, which groups audiences around common outcomes they seek, can be used to identify unmet market needs, inspire product innovation and better connect brands with users.
Audience needs interviews
Segmentation survey & analytics
Segment Persona communities
Identify
Prioritise
Empathise
Grow.
Placing audience needs at the centre of brand and products
Our Audience Needs Segmentations are iterative programmes of research that enable brands to grow by focusing product and marketing strategy on how they can deliver value for discreet addressable audiences. Providing insight and inspiration to help meet audience goals, minimise their pain points and enhance their lives.
1. Audience needs interviews
Exploratory video interviews with your target audience or users to uncover their Jobs-to-be-Done, underserved needs and contextual influences.
2. Segmentation survey & analytics
Foundational research and data analytics to break down your market into distinct addressable audiences. Will provide strategic direction and detailed segment understanding.
3. Segment Persona community
‘Pop-up’ research communities to deliver Personas that map and build empathy with audiences covering their needs, journeys & ideal experiences.
Discover more about how each stage of our typical Needs segmentation can help your brand…
1. Audience needs interviews
Our explorative and generative interviews will deliver the foundations needed to understand audiences’ needs, surface market opportunities and inspire new propositions.
Audience goals. Identify users’ Jobs-to-be-Done. What are the functional, social and emotional goals that users are looking to achieve?
Underserved needs. Find the gaps that exist within current products, services and brands as users seek to progress towards their goals.
User journeys. Establish the situations, stories, touchpoints, channels and experiences as users make progress & complete jobs.
Competitive context. Identify which products or services are used today in relation to audience goals. Explore the relative strengths and weaknesses from a user viewpoint.
Methods used:
Video user interviews
Video ethnography
2. Segmentation survey
A needs-based segmentation to help you understand what you need to build and how it needs to be marketed in order to engage specific audiences.
Discover:
The priority needs of your market. Quantify what the goals and objectives of your market are and which are most likely to be unmet.
Identify audience segments. What groups exist within your market that have common unmet needs that your brand can address?
The size of key opportunities. Which audiences are most valuable and are most logical for your brand to engage with and target?
How to target segments. Measure and visualise the behaviours, attitudes, needs, demography and other observable characteristics of key audience segments.
The strength of your value proposition. Receive feedback on your current value proposition, as well as potential innovations and concepts on your roadmap.
Methods used:
Market & Customer surveys
Segmentation modelling
3. Segment Persona community
A ‘pop up’ online community to deliver a collective view of your different target audience groups; blending user empathy, needs, journeys and emotions. Gain empathy and actionable product and market insights that increase the pull factor for your brand.
Discover:
Rich profiles. We go beyond superficial demographic profiles to bring to life the goals, pain points, context, behavioural bias and personalities of users.
Jobs-to-be-done. We uncover each persona’s functional, emotional and social jobs that they are looking to achieve and the relative importance of each.
Product & Brand Affinity. We identify the products and brands each Persona currently uses and highlights relative strengths, weaknesses and opportunities.
Persona-Product Fit. We establish how good a fit the persona is for the core proposition of your brand and identify strategies to increase the pull factor.
Build & map empathy. We discover what users see, hear, say and do as they seek to achieve their goals, together with associated pains and gains.
Methods used:
Pop-up Community
Ethnographic Diary
Our approach
An iterative segmentation approach combining immersive qualitative techniques, robust quantitative research and creative, empathy-building outputs. It will deliver an actionable solution to provide the confidence and inspiration to power product strategy and design.
Custom designed
There is no one size fits all segmentation solution. We collaborate and shape research around your unique service, market, and requirements.
Full-service consultancy
Our team of insight experts lead the project design, management, analysis and delivery of insights. And collaborate with you and your key stakeholders to ensure great project outcomes.
Lean, efficient, lower cost
Our combination of proven frameworks, technology and a remote-research approach allows insight budgets to go further without sacrificing value.
Influence & empathy
Our outputs blend great data visualisation, directional insights and empathy-building outputs to place customer segments at the centre of product and marketing strategy.
Outcome-led growth
Our focus on unmet needs helps you place consumers at the heart of strategic decision-making. We utilise segmentation to guide businesses towards product opportunities and effective positioning.
A creative and collaborative journey
Segmentation programmes are multi-faceted and often have to meet the requirements of a wide range of stakeholders. To ensure they embed successfully our Audience Needs Segmentations use the research process itself as a means of engagement.
To ensure everyone is invested in the outcomes and feels heard. Workshops, feedback forms, and collaboration all help to ensure your business is united around the delivery of a successful segmentation solution.
Blending science & art.
With over 20 years of experience, our analytics partners combine rigorous data segmentation modeling with deep expertise to deliver robust, intuitive solutions. All models are created bespoke based on the specific needs of your brand, market and audience.
Trusted data is at the heart of everything we do. All data collection is designed and quality checked to ensure it is representative, inclusive and unbiased.
Our surveys are GDPR compliant and administered by our ISO27001 certified survey fieldwork partner.
Segmentation Activation
Memorable and impactful research outputs are an integral part of our service at Waveform: bringing brands closer to their audiences, inspiring new ideas, and providing clarity.
Senior insight consultancy
Engaging & actionable reports
Empathy building outputs
Insight reports
A report which identifies unmet needs, introduces a segmentation solution, and profiles key segments including, size, value core needs & touch points
Insight consultancy
Our insight consultants are on-hand to share insights with you and your team via online debriefs & workshops or face-to-face in the UK
Segment Personas
Two needs-focused Personas for each key segment covering Jobs-to-be-Done, Empathy Maps, underserved needs, behavioural biases and influences
Operational toolkit
All you need to replicate the segmentation: golden-questions, Excel segment allocator, a predictive model to overlay onto your CRM database
Segmentation modules: Summary & pricing
Full-service
All of our projects are inclusive of custom project design, project management, analysis, reporting and consultancy.
Adaptable & custom solution
We adapt our research solutions so they reflect the distinct needs of your market and your brand.
There are three core stages to our Audience Needs Segmentations, however, they are independently valuable and can be commissioned separately.
1. Audience needs interviews
A series of interviews with your target audiences to understand their needs, motivations, pain points and experiences.
Method: Hour-long remote contextual inquiry interview with your core audience.
No. of participants: 10+
Core objectives: Establish audience desired outcomes, identify underserved needs, understand user journeys, build empathy, explore market fit for existing, new or competitor products
Outputs: An insight report, a visual executive summary and a debrief to your team
FROM £7,500
2. Segmentation survey
A rich and detailed survey of your market and users that identifies key audiences of interest and how to unlock these opportunities
Method: A 15-minute online survey via consumer panel and / or email invitation
No. of participants: 2,000+
Core objectives: Prioritise needs, segment on needs, prioritise segments, profile segments based on demographics, attitudes, behaviours, biases and brand affinities
Outputs: Insight report, Segment archetype profiles, excel tables with segments appended and a debrief to your team.
Optional outputs: Segment algorithm / database allocation tool / in-person workshop
FROM £25,000
3. Segment Persona community
A ‘pop-up’ online community designed to build empathy with the needs of individual segments and deliver rich and detailed segment Personas
Method: 7-day online community incorporating creative empathy-building tasks, diaries and discussions
No. of participants: 4 participants per segment of interest - average 16 participants
Core objectives: Understand how needs, solutions and semantics differ between segments. To bring your business closer to each priority segment
Outputs: 5-page pdf document per Persona. Two personas per segment. Collaborative launch workshop.
FROM £15,000
Want to find out more? Get in touch today
Tell us a little about you and your needs or share your project brief. We’d love to hear from you.