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Other industries would kill for the data that we have in the arts. Little do our customers know how much they reveal about themselves every time they buy a ticket!

Roisin Jones, Marketing Analyst, Wales Millennium Centre

Jargon Buster

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Segmentation

What does this mean?

A key technique intended to provide an enhanced focus for marketing activities and research exercises, based on sub-dividing the wider market into discrete and identifiable sub-sets.

Writer Alan Tapp [1998] describes this process as: ‘Splitting markets into discrete groups to be treated differently’.

How did we get this definition?

Segmentation is an approach that can be adopted to break down a wider market into smaller sections (or sub-sets) as a way of providing greater focus to marketing campaigns, activities and research exercises. Its underlying intention is to build in the potential to understand each discrete segment better, and to treat it differently from other segments.

Related and similar definitions

There are many ways in which a market can be segmented, and which one is used will depend upon the purpose of the specific activity being undertaken. However Wilson and Gilligan [1997] point out that ‘the majority [of segmentation techniques] can be grouped into four categories: geographic (i.e. where members of a segment could be found and reached) demographic ( i.e. by the segment’s age, economic circumstances and life-stage) behavioural (i.e. how members of the segment act in relation to your organisation) psychographic (or ‘attitudinal’, i.e. according to the segment members’ attitude to the arts, your organisation and other factors such as risk).’

When to use

A segmentation approach can be usefully employed in a number of settings. These include: analysing an audience as the basis for gaining enhanced understanding of itto inform plans for future marketing campaigns and activitiesas a basis for coding the records kept relating to an individualas a means of structuring and devising research instruments and exercises.