Don’t let the joke be on you: Even comics are segmenting their customers

With shrinking advertising budgets and a hyper-competitive marketplace, it’s increasingly important for brands and businesses to focus communications and offerings on their highest opportunity customer segments.

What types of people use your products and services?  How do they stack up demographically and psychographically?  What are their needs, attitudes and behaviors?  How can you better serve them?  At Kelton, we’re no strangers to uncovering these answers and carving out opportunities through our segmentation research and strategies.

While segmentation work isn’t funny business to us, it was exciting to see this manifest in the world of comedy.  Aziz Ansari has taken a strategic approach to making sure his jokes land well with his audiences.  Last week, Aziz hosted impromptu shows in New York City.  He required more than just cash from attendees; prior to the show, audience members had to register online and provide information on their marital status, gender, age and other demographic information.

If you fit the profile Aziz was looking for, you were in.  If not, you didn’t make the cut.  And if your ID didn’t match what you entered online, better luck next time – for a comedy show, they take things very seriously!

While I wish I went to the show, I can appreciate the thinking behind why I was denied access.  Through this approach, Aziz was able to create customized shows that will enable him to identify who he resonates with.  Married women?  Single men in their early twenties?  Or is it the best-case scenario – does everyone find his new material funny?

By segmenting his audience, Aziz can better tailor his future shows based on the demographics of the people sitting in the seats.  Kudos to Aziz for putting this into play with his sketches and check out some of our own examples of segmenting audiences for brands like PetSmart, Bloomingdale’s and Domino’s.