Market Segmentation Does Not Equal Trust

A piece from PharmaVoice caught my eye the other day. Titled Market Capitalization, it talks about how market segmentation can help pharma companies more precisely reach targeted audiences.

All well and good, until I saw this:

…just as personalized medicine is becoming a best practice for delivering optimal healthcare, personalized messaging to the physician audience is increasingly becoming a best practice for marketing.

Careful segmentation allows marketers to specifically target the audience with messages that speak directly to them. Segmentation helps deliver the right message to the right physician at the right time. Personalization shows physicians that they are intimately understood, which fosters trust and value.

No, it doesn’t.

Careful segmentation in messaging tells me there’s a better chance that your information will be relevant to me.

It does not tell me I’m intimately understood; it tells me you’ve got smart robots.

The difference matters.

Trust and Segmentation

Rifle-shot targeting and segmentation affects one out of four of the Trust Equation components: it speaks to your credibility. Credibility tells me you’re smart, credentialed, competent.

That’s helpful, indeed. But it doesn’t speak to the other three components: reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation – particularly the latter two.

The casual conflation of credibility and intimacy is, I think, a hallmark of modern marketers. Most of them, I suspect, would say, “Oh come on, Charlie, that’s just a small matter of semantics.”

Not so. Our words belie our thoughts. When we easily slide from a mechanical formula to a claim of “intimate understanding,” we have lost something. And to trivialize the slide is to lose even more.

Trust and Understanding

The dynamic of personal trust is complex; part of it is rational and deductive. But much of it is psychological, interior, calling on other-than-frontal-lobe kinds of brain functions.

That sense of being connected, appreciated, and validated leads us to lower our guard, to accept deeper relationships, and be open to advice-giving, among other things.

In this sense of the word, we come to trust by way of being understood; and we come to be understood through the means of other people intentionally paying attention to us.

This business of paying attention to other people is what drives personal trust creation. Marketers using technology to develop rifle-shot segmentation schemes are doing perfectly good and useful work. But not in their wildest dreams does this make customers feel “intimately understood, which fosters trust and value.”

Please, marketing and communications people, let’s try and remember the difference.