Groups And Microsegments

When I was listening to Kinney Zalesne (Microtrends author) present this morning at our Think Different event, there were several things that crossed my mind:

1. Which micro-trends am I part of?
   
2. How much micro-targeting is too much?
   
3. Will consumers self-identify into groups?
   

Without going back to the whole book, I can think of several micro-trends with which I associate:

• Marathoning
• Stay-at-home worker and extreme commuter
• 30-winker (don’t sleep a lot)
• DIY Doctor (research my own care)
• Pet Parent (pamper my dog)
• Video Game Grown-ups (enjoy playing Wii w/ and w/o my kids)
• Blogger

It has come up in the past two sessions where I have seen Kinney present. The question is how much is too much. Just because I know that you like cats, subscribe to Popular Mechanics and GQ, and have 3 siblings, should I use that information?

• I certainly think that more targeting is better although I might not always want you to tell me how much you know about me.
• You have to be flexible enough to allow for mistakes in interpretation and/or not too presumptuous. (For example, one of our co-founders is from Brazil but has been here for years. He recently started getting all of his communications from a few companies in Spanish. He didn’t opt-in, but they assumed his last name meant he spoke Spanish (which is not what they speak in Brazil BTW).)
• You have some issues of parity which must be either addressed or are legally required (i.e., you may have to treat everyone in a similar way). I am sure we might all like to drive high satisfaction for healthy members to increase their retention, but this deliberate adverse selection would be an issue and abuse of information.

Finally, there is a lot of discussion about capturing preferences (i.e., I prefer calls over letters) and how to segment populations. I think there is an interesting trend in social media for people to self-identify into groups. For example, I pulled up my LinkedIn profile to look for a second at all the groups to which I belong. The same thing is happening in Facebook. Until recently, this was not a huge driver of activity, but over the past 6 months, I have noticed people forming and joining groups. We want to be associated with certain things. I think if I knew how the information was being used that I would spend a few minutes during enrollment filling out information about how and when to communicate and interact with me. I think I would even reveal my Myers-Briggs category (INTJ) if it helped someone better deliver information to me that would make me healthier.

The younger generation is rapidly becoming used to revealing lots of information about themselves. I don’t think that things are considered as private as they once were.