Changing times for social marketing segmentation

Segmentation is one of a number of commercial marketing tools now widely used by governments, policy makers, social marketing practitioners and researchers to address some of the bigger challenges facing society. However, social marketing segmentation has been constrained by ethical concerns and problems with expertise and resources; with the consequence that its use lags behind what happens commercially. There is a pressing need for social marketers to take greater responsibility for developing their own segmentation practices, a change in mind-set which can be achieved in two ways. Firstly, greater effort is needed to tailor commercial segmentation tools for social marketing contexts. A social marketing targeting tool adapted from one routinely used by commercial marketers is presented to illustrate this point. Secondly, more needs to be done to capitalise on technological advance in pursuit of sophisticated segmentation approaches. Focusing on data availability, data capture and analytics, the chapter explores ways in which social marketers can take the lead to develop new methods and practices that capitalise on these advances.