Morning. Your segments are probably a description of your database, not of your buyers.
Marketing.
The Segmentation Cut
Of the cuts you currently use to split your market — the tiers, the industries, the company sizes, the personas — which one would change a single sentence of what you'd say to a buyer if you moved someone across it, and which one could you reach on purpose tomorrow rather than hoping it wanders past?
In 1956 the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing published a paper by Wendell R. Smith with a title that reads like a menu: 'Product Differentiation and Market Segmentation as Alternative Marketing Strategies'. Smith's point was that these are two different responses to the same fact — demand in any market is heterogeneous, an idea already well established in the economics of imperfect competition. Differentiation bends demand towards your supply: one offering, made to seem distinct, promoted across the whole market. Segmentation runs the other way. It accepts that the market is a set of smaller, more uniform submarkets and builds different offerings to meet them where they already are. The word 'alternative' in Smith's title was deliberate — a firm chooses, and the choice usually turns on whether it can afford to talk to everybody at once. What Smith didn't do is tell you where to cut. Day 4 settled that question: cut on the job the buyer is hiring you to do, not the demographic they happen to fit. Seventy years later the damage happens one step further on, because a job is not yet a market — and because it stays cheaper to cut where the data already sits. Industry, headcount, revenue band, job title and region are all in your CRM, so they become your segments, and not one of them is a reason anybody bought anything.
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