Research Audience Discovery

---
name: research-audience-discovery
description: "You have raw material (interview transcripts, sales-call notes, support tickets, churn surveys) and need to turn it into segments the team can write to, price to, and channel to. Or a teammate handed you a demographic and asked for a persona."
metadata:
  author: wayland
  version: "1.0.0"
  category: "research"
---

# Audience discovery & JTBD segmentation

## When to load this mode

You have raw material (interview transcripts, sales-call notes, support tickets, churn surveys) and need to turn it into segments the team can write to, price to, and channel to. Or a teammate handed you a demographic and asked for a persona.

Runs *after* `jtbd-interviews.md`. If you don't have interview data, stop and go get it.

## The premise

Don't segment by age, income, or job title. Segment by **job** — the progress someone is trying to make in a specific situation. Two 42-year-old marketing directors can be in different segments — one is firefighting, the other is laying foundations. Demographics correlate; jobs cause.

## The procedure

**1. Read every transcript twice.** First pass: listen for the *shape*. Second pass: pull verbatim quotes into a sheet with five columns — trigger event, push, pull, anxiety, habit.

**2. Cluster by job, not by person.** Group transcripts where the trigger event is structurally the same — same kind of moment, same kind of breaking point. A grad student and a retiree might both have hired the same productivity app to recover an hour of cognitive space after a draining commute.

**3. Name each cluster from the customer's words.** Not "the time-strapped professional" — that's marketer-speak. Try "the Sunday-night-bracing-for-Monday person." If you can't picture the moment, the name is wrong.

**4. Write a one-page segment card per cluster.** Required fields:
   - Job (a verb phrase: "Help me get the kids out without yelling")
   - Trigger event (one specific moment)
   - Push, Pull, Anxiety, Habit — two lines each, one verbatim quote per Force
   - Hired and fired (what they're switching to / from)
   - Where they look (only what *they said*, not what you guess)
   - Three of their own sentences you'd put on a wall

**5. Stamp the segment in `TEAM_MEMORY.md` under `## Research`.** Don't make Copy and Sales dig.

## Decision rules — validate vs. discard

**Validated when:**

- At least 5 transcripts cluster onto it (3 = hypothesis).
- Trigger event is concrete and named the same way by multiple people.
- All four Forces have verbatim quotes — not paraphrases.
- You can name what they would have bought instead, and why they didn't.
- A copywriter could draft the first sentence of an email to this person without asking you anything.

**Discarded when:**

- Defined by demographic alone with no consistent trigger.
- Trigger is abstract ("growth," "success") with no specific moment.
- You can't name the alternative they were weighing. (No alternative = no decision = no buyer.)
- The Forces sheet is mostly your inference, not their words.
- Two team members read the card and picture two different humans.

## Anti-patterns

- **Don't build personas from imagination.** "Marketing Mary, age 38, drinks oat milk lattes" is fiction. Fiction generates plausible-sounding strategy that doesn't move the needle.
- **Don't segment by ICP firmographics alone in B2B.** Two CFOs at identical-looking companies can be in different jobs depending on whether the board is happy with them this quarter.
- **Don't over-segment.** More than 5 segments and the team quietly collapses them back into one.
- **Don't lead with channel.** "We need to reach moms on TikTok" is a wish. Where they actually go when the trigger fires is what you put on the card.
- **Don't reverse-engineer segments from a campaign that worked.** Survivorship bias — you re-find existing buyers and miss the segments you're not reaching.

## Before / after

**Before (demographic persona, imagination-built):**

> "Sarah, 34, suburban mom of two, $90k household, follows wellness influencers. Wants to feel more put-together. Pain points: time, stress, mom guilt."

Team writes "feel more put-together" copy, runs Instagram ads, gets 0.4% CTR, blames the algorithm.

**After (JTBD segment card, transcript-built):**

> **Segment:** "The 5pm-handoff parent."
> **Job:** "Get me from end-of-workday to bedtime without losing my voice."
> **Trigger event:** Walking in the door and one kid is already crying. Named in 6 of 8 transcripts.
> **Push:** "I'm running on fumes by 5." | "I yelled at him over a juice box. Felt like a monster."
> **Pull:** "Something I can hand to my partner and they'd do it the same way." | "Less in my head."
> **Anxiety:** "Another app that wants my email and never gets opened." | "No time to learn a system."
> **Habit:** "We've been winging it for four years." | "My mom didn't need an app."
> **Hired:** Shared calendars, meal kits, parenting podcasts.
> **Fired:** Their own planning brain at 5pm.
> **Where they look:** Reddit r/Parenting at 11pm. WhatsApp groups with three other parents.

Now Copy has the first line. Channels knows where to be. Sales knows what to de-risk. Offer knows what "no setup" is worth.