Anthony Shephard-Williams shares his recent experience of a menu choice with added personality and explores the differences between fun profiling and real, robust segmentation.
I was in Turtle Bay recently and there, sitting on the table, was a leaflet asking me to scan a QR code to find out which of its seven new cocktails best matched my personality.
Naturally, I did it. What is it about working in market research that makes it so hard not to do these things?!
A few taps later, after declaring my group chat role and choosing the soundtrack to my night, I was told I was “The Feisty One” (this created an immediate memory about a very well-known Inbetweeners scene!).
My cocktail match? A Bajan Spicy Marg. Flirty, fiery and not here to play it safe.
It is all good fun, of course. Nobody is pretending this is a robust customer segmentation. But as a piece of customer engagement, it is doing something quite clever.
It turns a menu choice into a moment of self-recognition.
That’s what good segmentation does.
At their best, segmentations help people inside an organisation understand their audiences as real people, not just rows in a dataset. They create memorable shortcuts. They give teams a shared language. They help marketing, product, brand and experience teams make better decisions because they can picture who they are designing for.
The Turtle Bay quiz works because it is simple, playful and personal. It invites customers to say, “That’s me.” It gives them a reason to engage with the range. It creates a little social currency. You can imagine friends comparing results around the table: “Of course you got The Chaotic One.”.
That is the magic bit.
But with segmentation research – the rigour matters
A proper segmentation cannot just be based on what someone says they are like after two cocktails and a side of fries. It needs rigour. It needs a clear commercial objective. It needs to blend attitudes, behaviours, needs, motivations and context. Most importantly, it needs to be actionable.
If nobody in the business knows what to do differently because of it, it is just a pretty PowerPoint with colour-coding and some colourful names.
The best segmentations sit somewhere between science and storytelling. They are statistically sound, but also human enough to stick. They help organisations move beyond “who buys us?” to “why do they choose us, what do they need, and how can we serve them better?”.
So yes, a cocktail personality quiz is not market research.
But it is a lovely reminder of what good segmentation should achieve: make people feel understood, make choices easier, and give brands a sharper way to connect.
At Mustard, we love a good segmentation. The kind that combines proper research rigour with clear, memorable storytelling. The kind that does not just sit in a report, but helps teams make better decisions on an ongoing basis.
We have seen this first-hand, including a segmentation for a London-based bar / nightclub operator. [Not Turtle Bay in case you were wondering]. In a sector where mood, occasion, mindset and social context all matter, understanding the different needs and motivations of customers can be incredibly powerful.
So, if your segments feel more like labels than living, breathing, distinct customer groups, maybe it is time to take another look.
And if you need a hand, you know where we are! Happy to discuss your brief over a cocktail (or two).