Do Segmented Communications Shortchange Your Customers?

Technology marketers (and B2B marketers in general) mimic habits of their consumer counterparts by grouping customers into segments of shared behavior, habits and other attributes. Marketing managers in technology companies, for example, are famous for segmenting business from technical buyers.

But, all of this techno-business segmentation is old school – and CIOs are telling me to knock if off. One of my CIO clients informed me:  fully one third of MBA students at Stern are engineers and computer scientists. And more and more graduate students in technical fields have MBAs. So there you have it.  Businesspeople and technology people are marketing crossovers.

While the classic “speeds and feeds” data is best left to the technical buyer, it’s unfair to think businesspeople don’t care about how an underlying technology enables a business solution or adheres to technical standards (which can have significant commercial implications).

Similarly, technical buyers have complained for years that they are pegged as geeks when they have worked hard to step up as businesspeople -- given new demands to run IT like a business, to think of IT as an enabler of business strategy and to build more convincing business cases around technology investment proposals.

Everyone wants to know everything.

And, since business has become more team-oriented, your buyers want to understand the benefits being offered their fellow buyers.

Marketing communications that tell the whole story - to the whole buying center - are more effective that segmented communications that make unfair assumptions.

What do you think? Leave a quick comment.