Those in the East are more communal and interdependent while those in the West assign greater value to individualism.  People in North America tend to place more value on being unique and are more inclined to focus on their own positive qualities than East Asians.

These are very common beliefs, often promoted by cultural psychologists and popularized in countless articles and books.  They’re also gross stereotypes and wild oversimplifications that render themselves no more valuable than horoscopes or generational mumbo jumbo.

To wit, recent research compared people in the US, UK, Japan, Korea, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Lebanon, Turkey and Spain. The researchers used a variety of measures to test for evidence of independent or interdependent orientations.

A common finding within and across these cultures was that they all expressed distinct forms of independence…and interdependence.

In Latin American studies of a similar sort, the same finding – people in Latin American societies endorse some kinds of independence and some kinds of interdependence.  You don’t say?

People are people.  And yet, so much segmentation and analysis start and ends with group level thinking.  And all this group level thinking suffers from bias, stereotypes and way too much variance within the group to be of value.

What’s the alternative?

Consider this scenario.

• You have two prospective donors, and you only know two things about them.
  • They are generally supportive of your mission.
  • However, to maximize the chance each one donates you need to frame your mission differently to each one.
• You are able to get one additional piece of information about each (without interacting with them).

What’s the one piece of info you’d want to know about these two donors?  Probably not East/West, birth year, horoscope, past sustainer activity, wearer of red hats, shoe size, RFM bucket, Prizm cluster…

For starters, I’d want a piece of information that I know helps explain choices and that lends itself to prescribed message preferences.  In short, I’d want a piece of information with a lot of existing research and evidence to lean on.  This is like cheating without cheating.

This rules out attitudinal clusters and personas that live in PowerPoint slides as they have no theoretical basis and are probably built on a house of cards.

It also rules out information that might be tactically useful – e.g., income for ask string – but not helpful in guiding what to say or how.

And it rules out most demographics since those tend to be descriptive but not explainers of behavior (there are exceptions).

My vote would be Identity or Personality – both knowable without asking them and gives me loads of existing data and research to lean on to know how to effectively tailor the message.

The larger point is that your segmentation strategy should start at the individual level, using the two-donor scenario as a gut check.

You can and will get to group level but only by “rolling up” the individuals that fit together on a non-biased, rationale basis.

Kevin