A client sent over a 2021 planning deck last week. Slide nine was a segmentation study. Six segments, six invented names, a stock photo of a woman laughing alone with a salad. The fieldwork date sat in the footer in six point type. October 2019.
Nobody on the call flinched. We spent forty minutes arguing about whether Segment C skewed too suburban.
Segment C does not exist anymore.
In March the entire country changed how it shops, cooks, commutes, entertains itself and thinks about standing in a grocery aisle, and it has not changed back. That study cost somewhere north of two hundred thousand dollars and it is now a historical document. A good one. Genuinely interesting. Useful the way a 1998 mall directory is useful.
A segmentation is not a description of people, it is a snapshot of the conditions people were living under, and when the conditions break the segmentation breaks with them.
Here is the part that gets lost. The research was never wrong. It was right about a world that ended. The failure is not in the fieldwork, it is in the shelf life we assign it, which runs somewhere between three years and forever depending on how much we paid.
Three things worth doing before you route another dollar of media off it.
One, separate the stable from the situational. Values, motivations and identity move slowly. Channel behavior, purchase occasion, daypart and location move fast, and every one of those moved this spring. Keep the first half. Re-field the second.
Two, go get something small and current instead of something large and old. Two hundred minutes of qualitative with actual customers in September beats a beautiful cluster analysis from last year. Salt & Straw learned more about its customers by shipping pints to their houses than a study would have told it.
Three, write down what would have to be true for the segmentation to still hold, then check whether it is. If your heavy user was defined by an office commute, you do not have a heavy user. You have a memory of one.
The research was never wrong. It was right about a world that ended.
I've watched this from inside brand strategy rooms. Nobody wants to tell a CMO that the expensive thing has expired, least of all the agency that sold it to her. So it stays on slide nine, aging quietly, sending budget toward people who have moved.
Truffles and Barnaby have not altered their behavior once this year. Same window, same hours, same total indifference to everything I do for a living. They are the only segment I still trust.