The current primary season had me thinking about market segmentation this morning. In particular, I was thinking about how the US population is traditionally understood:
If we assume that people are basically normally distributed along this one-dimensional scale, you end up with a distribution that would look sort of like this:
Where each of those little blue dots represents some voters (the data is made up, with a random, normal distribution). There are some way to the right and there are some way to the left, but most of them are clustered in the middle, with increasing density as you move toward the middle. The two major parties basically jockey over where the dividing line is and try to establish their candidates to capture as much territory as possible while playing chicken on the issues they think they can slide by on.
The fundamental problem is that this market segmentation is based primarily on how American politics is organized and not on how American individuals actually think. For example, let's assign some typically assumed attributes to each party:
Do these clusters make sense? If I believe strongly in Christian values does that mean I have to be opposed to affordable health care? If I think that affordable education is important, does that mean that I must also be opposed to gun control? This is a market segmentation strategy that is "Inside Out" -- it is based on how the governing parties are organized.
Smart market segmentation is "Outside In" and starts with the criteria people use to make decisions and then organizes around that.
Instead of this one-dimensional approach to segmenting voters, let's consider some two-dimensional approaches. For example, let's consider some classics, such as personal freedom v. national security or government size v. economic stability.
Or, let's make this very simple and assume the same old Left/Right continuum and add a single new dimension of "Anti-establishment". In this case, I might argue that the population looks more like this (this data is completely made up):
If we assume that people are basically normally distributed along this one-dimensional scale, you end up with a distribution that would look sort of like this:
The fundamental problem is that this market segmentation is based primarily on how American politics is organized and not on how American individuals actually think. For example, let's assign some typically assumed attributes to each party:
Do these clusters make sense? If I believe strongly in Christian values does that mean I have to be opposed to affordable health care? If I think that affordable education is important, does that mean that I must also be opposed to gun control? This is a market segmentation strategy that is "Inside Out" -- it is based on how the governing parties are organized.
Smart market segmentation is "Outside In" and starts with the criteria people use to make decisions and then organizes around that.
Instead of this one-dimensional approach to segmenting voters, let's consider some two-dimensional approaches. For example, let's consider some classics, such as personal freedom v. national security or government size v. economic stability.
Or, let's make this very simple and assume the same old Left/Right continuum and add a single new dimension of "Anti-establishment". In this case, I might argue that the population looks more like this (this data is completely made up):
The distribution along the X-axis is the same here as in the previous drawing. What's different is that I now have that Y-axis to represent that person's opinion regarding the political establishment. With a wild majority of people effectively sick of the status quo candidates and more interested in finding an anti-establishment candidate than a traditional left/right candidate. This is why Sanders and Trump are popular. Both of them represent a break from the traditional choice that voters are given and are a chance to vote on a different (more meaningful) decision vector.
It's easy to chalk up Trump supports as racists and Sanders supporters as crackpots -- and maybe there's some truth in each, but the reason for their popularity is that the two choices that are available fail to satisfy the buying public.
