Beyond the PowerPoint Graveyard: Making Segmentation Actionable
Beyond the PowerPoint Graveyard: Making Segmentation Actionable
If you work in insights or marketing, you've likely experienced this all-too-familiar scenario:
After months of research, analysis, and investment, your organisation unveils a new customer segmentation. The presentation is impressive - filled with colourful personas, compelling quotes, and clear distinctions between customer types. Leadership is excited. Teams are energised. The future looks bright.
Six months later, that same segmentation sits gathering digital dust. The personas have been reduced to shorthand stereotypes. Different departments have reverted to their own ways of categorising customers. And the rich, nuanced understanding that was supposed to align your organisation has instead become another artefact in the PowerPoint graveyard.
This isn't just inefficient (and costly) - it's a missed opportunity to transform how your organisation understands and serves its customers.
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Why Segmentations Often Get Forgotten
Before we can make segmentation actionable, we need to understand why so many segmentation initiatives fail to gain traction. Our exposé has identified five key failure points:
1. The Handoff Problem
Most segmentations struggle not because they lack quality, but because they aren't set up for success from the start. Too often, the insight team develops a robust segmentation, but without early buy-in across key teams, it fails to find an owner after launch. Without clear ownership, evolution, and advocacy baked in upfront, even the best segmentations risk fading into the background.
As one stakeholder from a global fashion business told us: “You end up with a beautifully illustrated set of personas no one uses... loved by brand teams and ignored by everyone else.”
2. The Translation Gap
Even well-designed segmentations often fail to translate strategic understanding into tactical application. Teams struggle to connect high-level segment descriptions to specific decisions about products, campaigns, experiences, or communications.
As one brand leader explained to us, “We talk about the segments a lot. But when it comes to writing briefs or reviewing creative, they’re not really in the room… that’s a bigger problem than I’ve thought about before.”
3. The Systems Disconnect
Most segmentations exist outside the systems and tools teams use daily. They live in presentations, documents, or insight platforms rather than in CRM systems, marketing automation tools, design environments, or analytics dashboards.
4. The Measurement Void
Organisations rarely establish clear metrics for segmentation success beyond the initial research validation. Without ongoing measurement of how segmentation is influencing decisions and outcomes, its value becomes increasingly difficult to defend.
5. The Evolution Failure
Customer needs, behaviours, and contexts change, but segmentations typically remain static. Without mechanisms for evolution and adaptation, segmentations gradually lose relevance and credibility.
From Insight to Infrastructure: A New Approach
Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental shift in how we think about segmentation - moving from treating it as a research deliverable to establishing it as organisational infrastructure.
This shift encompasses five key dimensions:
1. From Handoff to Shared Ownership
Rather than treating segmentation as a one-time handoff from insights to the business, build shared ownership from the start. Securing early buy-in across teams ensures the segmentation is championed, evolved, and actively embedded over time and not left to drift.
- Create a cross-functional segmentation steering committee (ideally from the inception of the project) with representatives from insights, marketing, product, CX, and other key functions to input into the design and champion the rollout.
- Establish clear roles and responsibilities for segmentation maintenance and application
- Develop regular forums for discussing segmentation applications and challenges
- Create segment champions within each function who are accountable for application
In our research, we heard from a global services brand that created a segmentation design council - bringing together insight, CRM, brand, product and experience teams. Their job wasn’t to build a new model. It was to map the existing ones, identify overlap, and build the connective tissue. The result was not another segmentation, but a shared architecture. A way to navigate complexity without erasing it.
2. From Concepts to Applications
Move beyond conceptual segment descriptions to specific application frameworks for different functions:
- Develop segment-specific value propositions that guide product and marketing decisions
- Create messaging frameworks that translate segment needs into communication approaches
- Build experience principles that guide how different segments should be served
- Establish decision rules for how segments should influence prioritisation and resource allocation
3. From Documents to Systems
Embed segmentation into the systems and tools teams use every day:
- Integrate segment identification into CRM and marketing automation platforms
- Build segment toggles and filters into analytics dashboards
- Create segment-specific views in design and prototyping tools
- Develop APIs and data services that make segment data accessible across platforms
- Implement segment flags in customer service and support systems
Another organisation told us how they’ve embedded segmentation logic into their customer data platform (CDP). That meant every campaign, across every function, was targeting from the same base - even if the channels, tactics and creative were different.
“It didn’t simplify everything,” said one team lead. “But it stopped us contradicting ourselves.”
4. From Validation to Impact Measurement
Establish ongoing measurement of segmentation impact and value to ensure it stays relevant, drives real business outcomes, and earns continued investment:
- Create segment-specific KPIs that track performance over time
- Measure how consistently segments are applied across functions and decisions
- Track the business impact of segment-specific initiatives and approaches
- Establish regular reporting on segmentation ROI and influence
- Develop feedback mechanisms that capture how segmentation is being used
5. From Static to Dynamic
Design segmentation to evolve rather than remain fixed, so it keeps pace with changing customer needs, market dynamics, and business priorities
- Collect more information about customers gradually over time (instead of all at once) to build a richer, more complete understanding of each segment.
- Design segmentation so that the core traits stay stable, but parts like behaviours or attitudes can flex and update without needing a full rebuild.
- Set up simple processes to spot new types of customers early, and update your segmentation to include them.
- Regularly check whether your segments still match real customers, and make updates when things shift.
- Decide in advance what changes (like a major shift in customer behaviour) would mean it’s time to significantly update your segmentation.
Making It Real: Turning Insight into Infrastructure
Embedding segmentation into the fabric of your organisation isn't a one-person job. It demands a new kind of partnership - between insights, marketing, and other teams - committed to transforming segmentation from occasional reference point to everyday operating system.
If you're leading this charge, here's how to start:
For Insight Leaders: Architect the Foundation
Your role isn’t just to deliver segmentation. It’s to steward it.
Establish shared ownership, build clear translation frameworks, track real-world impact, and design modular systems that evolve as customers do.
For Marketing Leaders: Bring Segments to Life
Segmentation should fuel every stage of customer engagement - not sit on a shelf gathering dust.
Demand activation tools, embed segments into your systems, use them to drive strategies, and close the loop with insights to keep evolving.
Five Moves to Make Today
Wherever you are in your segmentation journey, these actions can help you build momentum immediately:
- Audit your current segmentation: Where is it being used? Where has it fallen through the cracks? Why?
- Map the ideal lifecycle: Sketch out what great segmentation governance, evolution, and activation could look like in your organisation.
- Identify champions: Find and empower cross-functional stakeholders who can drive shared ownership.
- Prototype an application framework: Pick one key function (such as campaign development or product strategy, for example) and show how segmentation can guide it.
- Set baseline metrics: Start tracking how segmentation is applied and what business impact it’s having, even if imperfectly.
From Insight to Action
The shift from segmentation as a deliverable to segmentation as infrastructure isn't a project. It's a revolution in how organisations drive growth.
When segmentation becomes part of how decisions get made - woven into tools, workflows, and metrics - it stops being a "nice to have" and becomes a business multiplier.
The future belongs to organisations that stop building PowerPoint decks and start building living, evolving customer understanding at the core of everything they do.
The question is: Will yours be one of them?
This article is part of our series on making segmentation truly actionable and impactful across organisations, drawn from insights shared in our latest exposé, "Rebuilding the Foundation: The State of Segmentation in 2025."
Want the full deep dive? Get the exposé here.
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