Marketing people use a really powerful concept called ‘segmentation’ to get their messages across to consumers. This technique can be easily transferred to public speaking as a tool to aid presentation or speech development.

Instead of trying to sell the same product to all consumers smart marketing people break the total market for a given product or service into ‘segments’ of customers who share similar interests and needs. The marketers then focus all of their efforts on one or two of these segments. For example, some insurance companies focus on insurance for ‘high risk’ young drivers, whilst other companies focus on women drivers.

So how can you use this method as a presenter?

The idea is to stop thinking about the audience as one great mass of people who share exactly the same beliefs and interests. Instead, think very carefully about the age, gender, beliefs, background etc., of your audience and you are likely to find that two or more segments emerge with individuals falling into clearly distinguishable groups. The objective is then to develop a presentation that takes account of all the major audience ‘segments’ interests and preferences.

Segmenting audiences is a useful tool that helps us remember that everyone in the audience is different and we need to take account of these differences when developing our presentations. In effect we need to remember that rather than one audience, we are often speaking to two or more audiences within a larger audience. Furthermore, the larger the audience the more important it is to segment it correctly.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 8:29 pm and is filed under Preparation, Audience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.