Marketers love market segments. The more we can wrap a bow around a group of consumers and stick a label on them, the easier our jobs seem to be. But every approach to segmentation raises the possibility of two fundamental errors.
The first is that we start to believe the segments have a life beyond our models. Here the mistake is to confuse our models of reality for reality itself. The Polish-American philosopher and engineer Alfred Korzybski put this best when he warned us all that “the map is not the territory”.
The second mistake is to use a mapworse, for a completely different place.
