There are only two things that count in customer segmentation: 

1. Did I find something insightful, and
2. Can I do something with that insight that makes money. 

Today, we are releasing a new feature on the PersonaLive taxonomy that adds the capability to view social media-generated information by gender. We believe this added level of granularity has the potential to 10x the number of insights gleamed from segmentation and 2x marketing ROI — especially for retail brands.

Until now, segmentation systems described the behavior of their segments as uniform. In reality, you have two very different types of people within each segment: males and females. They are so different that people of the same gender and different segments often have more in common than people of the opposite gender but in the same segment.

Let’s look at how the brand following for H01 #YoungStars differs by gender. Then we’ll talk about translating that insight into dollars with targeting.

Insights In Practice

Who are H01 #YoungStars? They are early-career, high-income young professionals renting near city centers or nice suburbs.

Let’s look at the overall brands this segment follows (both male and female).

All Genders

Overall, we see the young professional story playing out with Salesforce and Hubspot showing up in the top five brands followed by this segment. An on-the-go convenience story with GoPuff, and a fashion influence with ModCloth and Warby Parker.

Female Only

A new story emerges with females of this segment. We see that Female H01 #YoungStars are more than 3x likely to follow brands like Anthropologie, Lululemon, and Everlane. This fashion-savvy consumer cares about home and kitchenware (Sur La Table & Jonathan Adler).

Male Only

Big changes. Topping the list is GoPuff delivery. Think beer, bread, and Red Bull. Convenience is important to Male H01 #YoungStars. We also see a stylish watch brand (MVMT), two outdoor companies (Mountain Hardware & Black Diamond), and Dogfish Head Brewery (again, beer). 

You can see that our original story across H01 #YoungStars remains true. Fashionable young professional singles. But the flavor by which these play out is quite different for males vs. females. 

The brands change, but the themes remain the same.

Insights In Action

That’s a great nugget. But how do you activate on the knowledge that female H01 #YoungStars are 3x as likely to follow Anthropology, and males of the same segment don’t follow Anthropology at all? You need to be able to reach those genders specifically.

The PersonaLive Audience Builder makes that easy. By targeting females only, we see the audience size drop from 4.1 million to 2 million.

Back to our original statement in this post: There are only two things that count in customer segmentation: 

1. Did I find something insightful, and 
2. Can I do something with that insight that makes money. 

For H01 #YoungStars, we’d expect a minimum 2x improvement on ROI by 

1. Discovering a gender-specific insight, and 
2. Only targeting the relevant audience willing to spend the money.