Author: Jeremy Braune

At its core, GrowthTest is built around one simple but powerful idea:

Every ad has the potential to influence buyer behaviour — the key is knowing how, and why.

By mapping the buyer-behaviour dynamics that underpin your category, GrowthTest shows exactly how your creative affects audience movement between brands:

• Which potential buyers are inspired to buy from you next time.
• Which existing customers may be discouraged by your creative.
• Which competitor buyers are ready to switch in your favour.
• And which groups remain unmoved, and why.

This approach reframes ad testing from being a subjective scorecard to a behavioural model of commercial performance — a tool for understanding not just creative strength, but business impact.

Quantitative research underpins effective brand tracking. Surveys, panels and analytics provide the hard data that reveals how well a brand is performing and why. For financial services, where trust and compliance are paramount, robust quantitative evidence helps decision-makers distinguish between short-term sentiment shifts and long-term trends.

By combining large-scale survey data with behavioural and transactional indicators, research agencies can uncover the true drivers of brand health — such as perceived transparency, digital usability, or service reliability. This allows marketing and product teams to act with precision, optimising investment and communications strategies around what customers actually value.

Advanced analytics now extend these capabilities further. Predictive modelling and data integration tools enable agencies to forecast how changes in customer experience or market conditions may influence future brand strength. In this way, brand tracking evolves from reporting the past to guiding the future.

While market segmentation offers a broad market perspective, customer segmentation delivers a more focused and detailed analysis. It is typically conducted for one of two reasons:

1. Following market segmentation, customer segmentation narrows in on a particular segment to refine understanding and targeting.

2. As a brand grows, its customer base and target audience evolve, risking loss of clarity about key customers and their priorities, which can reduce marketing effectiveness.

Customer segmentation reassesses the customer base to identify the brand’s most valuable customers and determine how best to engage them. In addition to defining segments, it often produces detailed customer personas that bring each segment to life for internal teams. These insights allow the creation of B2C marketing campaigns that resonate deeply with target audiences, often on an emotional level. In highly competitive markets, further qualitative research at the segment or persona level can reveal unique insights that differentiate messaging.

Customer segmentation helps brands better understand existing customers by analysing data such as purchase history, preferences, and behaviour patterns. This deeper insight enables the grouping of customers into distinct segments for more effective targeting with tailored marketing messages and offers. Such targeted campaigns improve customer satisfaction, increase loyalty, and enhance overall customer lifetime value.

By segmenting customers based on behavioural, demographic, psychographic, or geographic criteria, businesses can create buyer personas representing specific segments. These personas assist sales and marketing teams in crafting communications that address each segment’s needs and desires, resulting in more personalized and relevant experiences.

Moreover, customer segmentation supports customer retention by identifying the most valuable customers and focusing marketing efforts on nurturing these relationships. Identifying which customer segments are most likely to be interested in additional products or services can optimize upselling and cross-selling efforts. This strategy boosts satisfaction and drives long-term profitability.

Customer segmentation also helps businesses understand the behavioural patterns of their customers, such as purchase frequency, product preferences, and responsiveness to marketing efforts. This behavioural insight allows companies to tailor their communication and offers to meet the specific needs of different customer groups, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

Before diving into data points and criteria, you must first establish the strategic boundaries of your market. This foundational phase ensures your segmentation efforts are aligned with your company’s overall growth objectives.

Many new businesses experience significant growth in the early years, often as the result of latent demand, entrepreneurial nous, gut feel, and often, a little good fortune.

However, even these businesses eventually reach the point where growth starts to flatten out, as newer market entrants with newer propositions begin to eat into their market share.

It is most often at this point when businesses are looking for better ways to both re-engage and expand their customer base, that customer segmentation research services are first considered. 

In the centre ring, sits the Buyer-Behaviour Dynamics that reflect your standing in the category; the proportion of buyers you’re holding onto, the proportion you’re winning over, and the proportion you’re losing to the competition. 

Hint: we also look at your competitors through the same lens

Wrapped around this nucleus of buyer activity, sit another four rings that all have equal importance:

• Customer experience 
• Comms
• Brand
• Buyer characteristics

The sixth and final ring is ‘strategy’ as in your strategy. Whether that be comms, brand, channel, or targeting strategy. This reminds us to consider the findings in the context of your strategic goals.

Before diving into the types of segmentation, it’s worth underscoring why segmentation is so important for any business aiming to effectively target its audience. Some key benefits of customer segmentation include:

• More Focused Marketing Strategies: Segmentation forces you to think about who you’re targeting and what they truly need or care about. This means you can focus your marketing strategy on the customers most likely to bring you success. You may even decide to ignore certain groups that are less profitable or not aligned with your business goals​. By concentrating resources on the right segments, you avoid wasting effort on long-shots and instead deepen your connection with those most likely to buy from you.
• Tailored Messaging: When you know your segments, you can craft messages that speak directly to each group. A one-size-fits-all advert might not hit the mark, but segmented messaging can address the specific pain points or desires of each segment. For instance, a travel agency might promote adventurous backpacking tours to one segment of young thrill-seekers, while offering relaxing cruise holidays to a segment of older travellers. Each sees a message that feels custom-made, which increases the chances they’ll respond.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Segmentation isn’t just about acquiring customers – it’s also about retaining them. By understanding different customer groups, you can ensure you’re meeting their needs more precisely. This could mean adjusting your product features, customer service, or user experience for different segments. When customers feel that a brand truly “gets” them, they are more satisfied and loyal.
• Higher Marketing ROI: Targeted campaigns generally yield better results. By sending the right message to the right audience, you’ll likely see higher conversion rates. This means your cost per acquisition goes down and your return on marketing investment goes up. In other words, segmentation helps you spend smarter. You’re not throwing money at uninterested audiences; you’re investing in those with the highest propensity to engage or purchase.
• Discovering New Opportunities: Sometimes segmentation research reveals an audience segment you hadn’t considered before. Perhaps you discover an emerging group of customers interested in a use of your product you hadn’t marketed for. This insight can lead to new product lines or marketing campaigns. Segmentation can uncover unmet needs in the market, highlighting opportunities to innovate or expand. It essentially provides a roadmap of where to grow, based on real data about distinct customer groups​.

In short, segmentation makes marketing more effective and efficient. It underpins the modern move towards personalisation. In fact, without basic segmentation, personalisation efforts can’t get off the ground. By grouping similar customers, you create a foundation on which to build targeted tactics like personalised emails, segment-specific promotions, and more.

A robust brand tracking programme will measure a range of indicators that together paint a picture of brand health. Common metrics include:

• Brand Awareness: How many people know your brand? This can be spontaneous awareness (consumers recall your brand unprompted) or prompted awareness (they recognise it when shown)​. High awareness is usually a prerequisite for growth. (Fun fact: 94% of people on the planet  recognise the Coca-Cola logo, showing the power of a well-established brand​).
• Brand Associations & Image: What qualities or attributes do people associate with your brand? Does it align with the image you want to project? Tracking brand imagery and personality associations reveals if consumer perceptions match your brand positioning​.
• Customer Satisfaction & Loyalty: Do customers stick with your brand? Metrics like repeat purchase rate or Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauge loyalty and likelihood to recommend. Loyal customers tend to forgive occasional missteps and spread positive word-of-mouth.
• Consideration & Preference: Among those aware of your brand, how many would consider purchasing it? Preference metrics show where you stand versus competitors in the customer’s mind.
• Usage & Purchase Metrics: How often are people buying or using your product/service? Tracking purchase frequency and usage occasions helps you understand engagement depth​. It can reveal, for example, if a marketing campaign led to more frequent use of your app or product.
• Perceptions of Value and Quality: Do consumers feel they get good value from you? How do they rate your quality relative to others? These perception metrics often drive repeat business and pricing power.

By keeping tabs on these factors (and more, depending on your industry), you build a rich dataset over time. This historical view is crucial – a single data point only tells you so much, but a trend can reveal whether your brand is on the rise, holding steady, or declining in the eyes of customers.

A clear understanding of your audience is the foundation of any brand strategy. Market research helps you:

• Identify demographics: Age, gender, location, income level, and more.
• Understand psychographics: Values, interests, and behaviours.
• Track buying habits: Preferred products, spending patterns, and decision-making processes.

For example, a brand targeting Gen Z will need a vastly different approach than one targeting baby boomers. Market research ensures your strategy resonates with the right audience.

Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk from the Ehrenberg Bass Institute developed the concept of Brand Salience, which is “the propensity of the brand to be noticed or come to mind in buying situations”.  If your brand isn’t repeatedly coming to mind when your customer is ready to buy, they can’t become a loyal customer.  So ensure that your marketing is targeting the right people with the right messages with the right frequency to generate brand salience.

Next, we consider how best to address the likely budgetary challenges facing any start-up that wishes to undertake early-stage brand tracking but needs to make a relatively small budgets go a long way.

It’s important that you find a research agency that is able to tailor your brand tracker to your brand’s needs and budget in the early days, whilst also building in the flexibility to extend the brand tracker over time..

We could call this version of brand tracking the ‘lite’ or ‘skinny version’. And by skinny we mean being hyper-focused on the four elements that determine overall tracker cost:

1. The number of questions asked: one of the key variables impacting brand tracker cost is the time it takes for respondents to complete a brand tracking survey. The old adage that time is money applies here, and rightly so.

Consumers must be fairly compensated for the time they have taken to share their knowledge and opinions and therefore the variable costs of a 15 -minute survey are proportionately higher than one that is say, around 5 minutes long.

The skinny version should lean towards the shorter survey – one that focuses on the key brand metrics and includes just two to three, key competitors.

2. Sample sizes: this is another (and understandable) variable that impacts on fees. The more people interviewed in a brand tracking survey, the more it will cost.

As with any data set, as a general rule, bigger is better, but in real life we make pragmatic compromises all the time and that’s what we need to do with sample sizes. The good news is that we can be smart about how we build up our overall sample size, ensuring that the data still provides for statistically robust analysis and tracking of the key audiences.

3. The frequency of waves: by now the picture should be clear – it’s a numbers game! The more questions asked and the more people asked together have a multiplier effect.

Another multiplier is how often brand tracking waves are run. Setting budget aside for a moment, there’s no fixed cadence for brand tracking and the ideal frequency should be determined by category dynamics; how active the category is and how susceptible it is to quick changes.

In fact, wave frequency doesn’t have to be at equidistant points in time. It might be more appropriate to run a first wave prior to a four-month summer campaign, another just after the campaign has finished, and then another just before the next summer’s campaign.

However, when it comes to the lite version of tracking, it’s better to think in terms of 6-monthly or annual waves, rather than quarterly or monthly ones.

4. The reporting: to an extent, we will have already built hyper-focus into the reporting by incorporating a shorter survey, with more targeted sample sizes, and optimised frequency.

However, there is still more that can be done. Rather than an in-depth analysis followed by a face-to-face presentation and workshop, the skinny brand tracker can provide an online dashboard that displays pre-agreed brand metrics whilst also providing you with the ability to download the data, run charts, and even carry out your own quick analysis.

The elements above that define an early-days brand tracker are all about making compromises whilst being hyper-focused on what really matters; the ‘must-haves’ rather than the ‘nice-to-haves’.

What shouldn’t be compromised on is the research target audience. It’s imperative that this is specified correctly from the start and doesn’t change. As a rule of thumb, the brand tracking research audience should be category users. The definition can be decided on at the outset and it’s best to spend some time thinking about this and getting it right, as changes down the line can throw out wave-on-wave comparisons.

To move beyond this shortcoming, we suggest a reappraisal of the ways in which a customer segmentation is set up, executed, and delivered. An approach that harnesses the proliferation of computational power and digital technologies to capture and analyse data in real-time to create living, dynamic segments that don’t suffer from having a relatively limited working life.

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to call out the traditional approach and then compare that with the suggested new approach. We’ll start with data capture.

• the traditional approach:
  1. design an in-depth questionnaire comprising of circa 45-50 questions
  2. capture the data over a short, fixed period in time, circa 1-2 weeks
  3. survey a robust sample size of circa 1,500 category users / buyers
• the new approach;
  1. design a series of short, quick-to-answer surveys (approx. 4-5 questions) that are individually discrete but pieced together, overall cover the totality of the questioning including in the traditional questionnaire
     • use AI-driven imputation to generate a comprehensive data set, drawn from the discrete variables captured in the bite-sized surveys
  2. apply an ‘always on’ approach to data capture, ensuring a constant feed of real-time information on customer demographics, behaviours, and attitudes
  3. survey thousands of category users / buyers

And next we’ll look at the application of segmentation analytics and identification of the segments:

• the traditional approach:
  1. An intensive two week period of data analysis using statistical methods including Factor analysis, Cluster analysis, and Discriminant Analysis to identify the segments in terms of the factors and features that set them apart from the other segments, and the size of the market each segment occupies.
  2. Followed by a round of collaborative sessions between the research agency, the analytics experts, and the end client to look over and decide on which ‘segment solution’ to adopt, i.e. do we opt for the four, five, or six segment solution?
  3. Bring the segments to life as customer personas, presented back in a formal presentation and/or workshop.
• the new approach:
  1. Retain the period of data analysis using statistical methods including Factor analysis, Cluster analysis, and Discriminant Analysis to identify the segments
  2. And as before, decide on which ‘segment solution’ to adopt
  3. Bring the segments to life as customer personas, hosted in an online environment, providing you with constant and ready access to your key customers segments along with the insights into how to most effectively reach and communicate with them
  4. Then refresh the segmentation analytics every 6-8 weeks to track shifts in behaviours, attitudes, and demographic profiling across and within the segments