When customers move like starlings — and what it means for segmentation

For decades, marketers have relied on segmentation to understand customers. But consumers don’t stay in neat boxes. Behaviors evolve, influences spread, and groups form and dissolve in ways that traditional models can’t predict.

One of the clearest ways to understand this fluidity comes from nature itself — in the mesmerizing patterns of starling murmurations.

The murmuration epiphany

I have studied customer segmentation — from both marketing science and statistical viewpoints — for a few decades. But my big breakthrough, my big aha moment, came about 15 years ago when I was watching starlings.

I wasn’t even watching them live. I was just watching them on video. Starlings and several other species exhibit a fascinating flocking behavior known as murmuration. If you’re not familiar with it, I recommend looking it up. (Although be warned, the videos are addictive.)

Describing a murmuration is difficult. Tens of thousands of birds swarm, creating giant structures out of nowhere. Just as quickly, they disappear and transform into new ones. What’s amazing is the strength and clarity of each structure and the fluidity with which they form, morph and vanish.

Watching these videos, I immediately realized this was a lens onto other complex behaviors — such as consumer behavior. Like the starlings, consumer behavior is highly influenced by the individuals around us.

While individuals have traits such as values and experience, they express themselves through their relationship with the greater flock. And like murmurations, this movement is fluid and can shift in sometimes startling ways.

Dig deeper: How to move beyond performative segmentation and embrace authenticity

Why traditional segmentation falls short

Traditional segmentation tries to divide consumers into a small number of similar groups. These may be based on demographics, attitudes or past behavior — but they tend to be coarse and rely on similarity assumptions that can be misleading. Treating every 18- to 25-year-old male as the same is unlikely to yield true insight into your customer or the products you need to bring to market.

With the advent of digital marketing, we entered a new world that promised one-to-one marketing and hyper-personalization. It has been highly effective, but underneath it lies a problem most of us in the industry struggle with.

While we can market to individuals, most non-digital products and services have built-in inertia that can’t keep up. A car may be customized with colors and accessories, but the underlying model is the same. We may target an individual, but the car they buy is still designed for the broader segment.

Product inertia is a topic in its own right, and much work has gone into creating more flexible, agile product architectures. However, the underlying tension remains between the simple, monolithic segments product designers favor and the promise of one-to-one marketing.

Dig deeper: AI’s personalization magic starts with the data you can’t see

The shift toward fluid segmentation

What is the alternative? Is there a better way to view segmentation that isn’t rooted in fixed groups yet still allows products and services to keep pace? 

Over the years, many approaches to this conundrum have emerged, with names like:

• Dynamic segmentation.
• Fluid segmentation.
• Real-time segmentation.
• Agile segmentation.

They all aim at the same issue: tracking shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviors quickly while ensuring products can adapt.

How AI changes the game

After my murmuration epiphany, I presented this concept at a conference and got a mixed reaction. Some were excited, others skeptical. Skepticism stemmed largely from doubt that we could extract, assess, codify and analyze these emerging patterns in a stable way.

At heart, it was a machine learning problem — and a difficult one. We had to identify and assess emergent groupings for business opportunity and feasibility. Sometimes, we analyzed dozens or even hundreds of scenarios in a single day and built immediate business cases.

Fast forward to today, and we have AI tools that can do that for us.

Innovative companies recognize this capability, rethinking both segmentation and product architectures.

Dig deeper: How to revolutionize your market segmentation with genAI

Chaos and structure in consumer behavior

Murmurations also show the relationship between chaos and structure. One-to-one marketing embraces chaos, treating everyone as an individual. Segmentation looks for structure — but in a static way, with most companies sticking to a single scheme for years.

Murmurations reveal that chaos creates structure but is fluid and unpredictable. While the mathematics of flocking behavior is well studied and mature, it is descriptive, not predictive. It can explain what has just happened — but not what the birds, or consumers, will do next.

What this means for marketers

To apply this to your business:

• Consider the lifecycle of your product or service and how quickly it can adapt. This will differ for an auto manufacturer versus a SaaS provider. 
• Ask how your company defines product design and marketing segments and whether the two are aligned. 
• Look at your customers’ emergent behavior. Are they fixed or constantly evolving and forming new structures?

Individuals are part of societies, where groups, fads, beliefs, needs and behaviors are constantly emerging, taking shape and fading. Your products and your marketing must follow suit.

Marketers who recognize this fluidity — and equip themselves with AI to follow it — will be better positioned to design products, deliver experiences and capture opportunities as they emerge.