Segment

One of our favorite reads is Dan Frommer’s Consumer Trends report. In his latest, released this week, were two nuggets that felt, roughly, tied:

• Most Americans would choose to be 25% healthier over 25% wealthier.

• Most Americans seem to be “detractors” in their own lives’ NPS survey.

Dan’s “Life Sat” survey found, though, that most age segments scored roughly the same—somewhere in the 6.something range. While there were differences based on household income or how many kids a respondent had, it’s interesting that health—if we’re to believe the first bullet above—would have a meaningful impact on scores while wealth seemingly wouldn’t.

Breaking it down: health would lift any segment’s score more than “wealth,” since more “wealth” is less desirable than more “health” and most Americans seem clustered around the same “Life Sat” score, anyway.

We spend a lot of time in marketing talking about audience segments and how different audiences respond differently to different hooks. It is true.

But what’s also true is that, usually, even our different customers are the same in many ways. And, usually, those similarities can move the needle more than optimizing different segments with different messages.