If you’re reading this, you’ve made a choice. Unlike most segmentation, this one wasn’t inferred. It was yours.

Aside from ethical failures and skewed data, segmentation can create a specific type of wreckage. What looks like an innocuous step in the market research funnel may just be a suffocating loop.

In a nutshell: categorization and targeting are conducted for efficiency; but if personalization becomes manipulative, audiences may perceive a threat to their freedom or resist categorization and push back. To restore trust, the communicator starts hedging and adapting its approach, prompting further audience response. What ensues is an arms race in persuasion and defense that alters the relationship for outreach to come. It’s a cautionary tale about captivity, with keys changing hands.

Let’s start with the hubris. Tiering is depicted as a proven method to identify and engage priority groups, one in which communicators control the narrative, the delivery and accurately predict traction. Regrettably, this is a fantasy we need to disavow. The relationship between audiences and communicators is fluid, dynamic and the interplay is where the plot takes place.

Segmentation requires the categorization of attributes to predict behaviors, and it informs personalization that applies the right amount of pressure to optimize emotional and cognitive response. This engagement continuum has a legitimate purpose of cutting through the noise with precision, but it’s a double-edged sword.

For targeted groups, it plays out as a tug of war between agency and convenience. Personalization is appealing in a time-pressed and data-overloaded world. What’s not to like? Receiving the right offer, on time, with a message that has the perfect dosage of convincing and free will. Peachy.

Alas, the currency of this convenience is the personal information it requires to profile accurately, the hazy version of consent it relies on to continue luring, and the ongoing surveillance needed to adapt to barely detectable shifts. In the beginning, it doesn’t appear threatening, but it’s not because it is large that you’re not living in a cage.

For communicators, it’s the tipping point between independence and engagement. When engagement numbers falter, the pragmatic response is to adapt to stakeholders’ feedback to mitigate dips in approval and conform to expectations. Optimization dresses up as hedged content, meek tone and angles polished into oblivion. This is a nihilistic zone for meaning: when feedback is the sole driving force, communication becomes customer service.

Adaptation can also tip into sycophancy. The OpenAI update to GPT-4o was intended to make the model more intuitive and user feedback contributed to reward signals that were used in the update. The company faced significant criticism and negative feedback for its model deemed overly flattering and sycophantic and promptly rolled out changes.

In a shrinking attention economy, upping the ante of personalization can help address fatigue, apathy or slower response times.

Temporarily.

At some point, audiences learn to recognize persuasion tactics and the targeting logic they’ve been subjected to and resist it. Their resistance is driven by a perceived threat to freedom, a reluctance to change or concerns of deception and it manifests as avoidance, contesting, biased processing and empowerment. They can also experience reactance when personalization leverages their personal information in a way that exceeds utility.

From that point onward, audiences are no longer the passive agents they were made to be. They look to understand the communicator’s motives and how it categorizes them, anticipate its next move, to adapt their response. With rules of engagement redefined before their eyes, communicators learn that they don’t own the act of segmenting.

It’s a shared capability. Who’s captive now?

Faced with a backlash of small or epic proportions, communicators can reduce reactance by emphasizing freedom of choice and softening controlling language or attempt to counter or avoid resistance.

In that newly shaped dialogue, outreach may change form, but the public learns to decode and outplay attempts with their own brand of defense. Adblocking and counter-blocking are among many examples. It becomes an absurd game of hide and seek in which no one wins because the message plays second fiddle to intent.

The 2023 Bud Light boycott is a case in point. A Bud Light partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney sparked outrage from conservative consumers who interpreted the association as Bud Light taking a stance on transgender identity. They boycotted the brand in retaliation. US sales went down and the product lost its crown as the top-selling beer in America.

Anheuser-Busch InBev’s response to feedback came quickly. They stated that they hadn’t intended on entering such a highly divisive social debate and went back to their traditional territory: summer, football and social gatherings. The pivot was condemned by Dylan Mulvaney, LGBTQ+ groups and prominent critics as abandonment. Bud Light segmented its audiences commercially, but its audiences segmented it back culturally. Strategic adaptation isn’t a neutral act, and it keeps receipts.

As readers, it would be comforting to distance ourselves from segmentation and targeting’s harmful occurrences because we didn’t engineer it on a grand scale, but the call is coming from inside the house. Hypocrisy need not apply. From the LinkedIn post carefully crafted for followers or the presentation tweaked to win over a group holding power, the adaptation screams transactional strategy, even when we tell ourselves that the domesticated version is only optimization. Banal, yes. Inconsequential, nope.

And for a cinematic version of the loop, consider what just happened here: you chose to read this piece to the end while inferring my intent. And I designed it anticipating your response. Who’s segmenting now?

Catherine

Ps: In my defense, I was left unsupervised.