Introduction

People only use products and services that fit into their comfort zone. Since the concepts held in their minds drive their actions, comfort zones are defined by their conceptual mindsets. Comfort zones define individuals’ meaning of life and establish their place in the world. They become evident when individuals manage conflicts, as the comfort zone provides their safety framework. Comfort zone segmentation is needed to address the people who decide or participate in the decision-making process for buying a product, service, or idea.

When a value proposition is needed and aligns with the comfort zone of a potential buyer, the likelihood of closing a deal increases significantly. Unicist comfort zone segmentation was developed to facilitate access to potential customers by observing their habits in terms of actions and ideas.

Unicist comfort zone segmentation is an upgrade of the unicist conceptual segmentation method. It operates based on observable behaviors and utilizes unicist ontological reverse engineering for definition, unicist semiotic groups for validating conclusions, and destructive tests to confirm functionality.

Comfort Zone Segmentation and Differentiation of Products and Services

“We define a market segment as a group of individuals or organizations that would buy a specific value proposition being offered. This means that, on the one hand, they need the product/service, but on the other hand, they consider the value proposition as their ‘first choice.’ It is not a group of hypothetical buyers; it is a group of potential buyers.”

Innovations and differentiations define the competitive advantage of companies, but they might also exclude products and services from the comfort zones of potential buyers. If that happens, buying processes are inhibited. Comfort zone segmentation was developed to include innovations and differentiations within the comfort zones of individuals or to expand these zones without changing their structure. By understanding the implicit segmentation used by Apple, Walmart, ChatGPT, and Honeywell, you will see comfort zone segmentation in action.

Comfort zones delineate the framework for human habits, which, together with the concepts stored in people’s minds, are stored in episodic, procedural, and semantic long-term memories. These memories shape the habits, customs, and ethics of individuals and establish the patterns of actions and thought processes used within their comfort zones.

About Comfort Zones

When individuals are pushed beyond their comfort zones, they naturally generate fallacious ideas and dysfunctional actions.

Adaptive processes occur when individuals need to influence their environment while simultaneously being influenced by it. A comfort zone is a safe space where individuals can be themselves without the stress caused by environmental factors.

The comfort zones of adults are shaped by their capacities, beliefs, and life experiences. Each person unconsciously constructs a comfort zone where they experience no stress—a place where they control their environment and are not compelled to exert additional influence.

The outcomes of unicist comfort zone segmentation processes include the development of customer profiles and the necessary unicist binary actions to effectively engage them.

What are Comfort Zones?

The research on the functionality of comfort zones at The Unicist Research Institute was triggered by the need to simplify the approach to human behavior in the social, familiar, and business fields. It allowed defining the functionalist principles and the binary actions needed to understand and manage according to people’s comfort zones. Comfort zones, along with the concepts people hold in their minds, are stored in episodic, procedural, and semantic long-term memories.

There are two types of comfort zones: functional comfort zones and stagnated comfort zones. Functional comfort zones foster individuals’ evolution based on their unsatisfied needs, while stagnated comfort zones establish a parallel world to ensure that an individual doesn’t need to adapt to the environment.

The Unicist Functionalist Principles of Comfort Zones

The functionalist principles that define the functionality of functional comfort zones are as follows:

Purpose:
The purpose is to provide a safe place in the world that offers an environment where an individual can adapt and evolve.

Active Function:
The active function is represented by the inner freedom people have to be aware of their possibilities and liabilities.

Energy Conservation Function:
The energy conservation function is the inner freedom people have to develop adaptive actions where individuals contribute to the environment and benefit from their counterparts.

The Gravitational Force:
The gravitational force is defined by the unsatisfied needs of individuals that drive their evolution and establish common ground with people who have similar needs.

The Catalyst:
The catalyst is defined by the ideals of individuals that arise from unsatisfied needs and drive the actions of individuals.

Roles & Comfort Zones

Roles are part of an individual’s comfort zone, defined by their meaning of life in a specific field of action. They are integral to the comfort zone of individuals and define their freedom to do.

The roles people assume in a specific field of action allow for the inference of their comfort zones, which define the space where real communication processes can be developed or common grounds can be established.

The comfort zone evolves driven by two different fundamentals:

1. Unsatisfied needs that become essential for an individual’s survival.
2. The evolution of an individual’s ethical intelligence, which generates new ideals.

Each role is defined by a functionality that dictates the resources that need to be available. Communicating with people requires using the semiotic that corresponds to the role of the individuals.

Roles collide when they belong to different comfort zones. Functions differing within the same comfort zone do not constitute different roles, but rather different activities.

Communication between different comfort zones requires the establishment of a superior comfort zone that integrates them. Learn more

The Functionality of the Segmentation Method

The discovery that the concepts people hold in their long-term memory drive their actions, and that conceptual short-term memory triggers perception, has elevated marketing to a superior level and enabled the definition of comfort zones.

Unicist comfort zone segmentation is, on the one hand, an approach to the concepts and fundamentals that underlie products and services and drive buying decisions. On the other hand, it is an approach to the roots of buying processes to define operational customer profiles. It includes the definition of binary actions and commercial, semantic, semiotic, and branding objects to influence buying decisions.

Unicist Comfort Zone Segmentation and Customer Profiles

This is a synthetic presentation of the unicist comfort zone segmentation model, which is used to define customer profiles and develop the necessary binary actions and marketing objects to enhance market growth.

From a conceptual point of view, human intelligence is defined as an individual’s capacity to produce the necessary information to develop strategies to adapt to the environment in which they live.

The objective of research on human behavior was to uncover its nature in order to influence individuals, their evolution, and the environment. This research led to the discovery of structural drivers that define the nature of human behavior and the functionality that defines their comfort zones.

Understanding the roots of human behavior has enabled the development of segmentations that define the profiles and comfort zones of potential customers:

• User Experience Segmentation
• Conceptual Segmentation
• Role Segmentation
• Bond Segmentation
• Lifestyle Segmentation

User Experience Segmentation

User experience is the starting point of the comfort zone segmentation model. It defines the broad context (category) that influences buyers’ decisions. Every product or service has a use value, which becomes evident through users’ experiences.

User experience is addressed using unicist ontological reverse engineering to discover the concepts of products and services.

To manage comfort zone segmentation, it is necessary to begin by defining the category of products or services and their use value based on experiences, and to compare these products or services with substitutes and succedanea.

When the product is a breakthrough, it can only be compared with a succedaneum, and the definition of the user experience needs to be guided by the development of destructive pilot tests. After this segmentation has been defined, it serves as a market boundary and as an input to define the other aspects of comfort zone segmentation.

The Conceptual Segmentation

This segmentation is defined by the extrinsic concept of a product or service and determines the attitudes and comfort zones of potential buyers. It establishes the fundamentals of a product. Conceptual market segmentation describes the nature of a product as perceived by the market.

Conceptual market segmentation details the concept that is implicit in a product or service, based on its purpose, its procedures, and its action guide.

The value proposition instills “suspicion” in the minds of prospective buyers if the category does not align with their comfort zones.

The Role Segmentation

This segmentation is defined by the benefits generated by the characteristics of a product and determines its role. The role of a product is the function it fulfills. It deals with the significance of using products and is associated with their aesthetics and functionality.

Functionality is defined as the capacity of something to satisfy an individual’s needs and meet the requirements of the comfort zone.

Functionality is homologous to aesthetics. When discussing functionality, we refer to perceived functionality. The same product can have different roles depending on the characteristics of a segment.

A value proposition needs to align with the necessary role and aesthetics to trigger the buying process of a segment. If it does not, the proposition is either not perceived or is rejected.

The Bond Segmentation

The psyche of individuals defines the type of bonds they establish in an environment. Bond segmentation is defined by the type of relationship a user establishes with a product or service. It determines the type of product-user bond.

The bonds between buyers and the product must fit into the requirements of an individual’s comfort zone. Psychology allows us to define the types of bonds between products and users.

The bond of a value proposition needs to be positioned within the limits established by the psychological segmentation and its implicit comfort zone. If not, “doubts” are instilled in the mind of the potential buyer, inhibiting the buying process.

The Lifestyle Segmentation

This is defined by the social role (comfort zone) of the buyer in the environment, including the ethical intelligence that defines the intention underlying the use of a product or service.

It determines the necessary attributes of a brand. Lifestyle segmentation defines the restricted context of the role, bond, and conceptual segmentation.

Lifestyle segmentation allows value propositions to be installed within the limits established by the collective intelligence of a culture that establishes the catalyst of individual comfort zones. When it exceeds these limits, the proposal becomes marginalized.

Unicist Customer Profiles

The unicist customer profiles enable a focus on specific comfort zone segments and expansion through their influence on adjacent groups of potential customers. These profiles are built based on the unicist comfort zone segmentation model and are used based on unicist binary actions and commercial, semantic, and semiotic objects. The objective of using unicist profiling technology, binary actions, and marketing objects is to increase the effectiveness of marketing.

Application Fields

Unicist comfort zone segmentation was primarily developed for B2C marketing and represents an upgrade of unicist conceptual segmentation. It is the natural approach when there is a need to sell a product, an idea, or introduce innovations to individuals.

Nevertheless, it has multiple application fields in AI-driven process design, personal relationship building, work process design, teamwork building, research labs, business application building, strategy building, problem-solving, etc.

This segmentation model is the core of the Unicist P&P AI Module that functions as a CRM add-on to automate the approach to potential customers based on their comfort zones.

Conclusion

The use of unicist comfort zone segmentation is meaningful in any proactive “marketing” activity. However, it becomes essential in supply-driven markets and when marketing innovative solutions or differentiated value propositions. Unicist segmentation is necessary to define accurate profiles and to design the required binary actions to expand possibilities and ensure results and the marketing objects that accelerate marketing processes.

Annex

Binary Actions in Marketing

The unicist comfort zone segmentation provides the information of the binary actions that need to be developed to expand marketing possibilities and ensure results. Unicist binary actions are two synchronized actions that ensure the generation of results in marketing processes by matching the concepts potential buyers have in their minds and fitting into their comfort zones. These binary actions always include the use of catalysts to open spaces and accelerate marketing processes.

There are 2 levels and 4 types of Unicist Binary Actions

The UBAs include two levels of action:

• Level a) deals with the expansion of boundaries, which drives the maximal strategy of a function or object.
• Level b) deals with the assurance of results and drives the minimum strategy of a function or object.

According to their functions, there are 4 types of actions:

UBAs 1 – To Catalyze Marketing Process

These UBAs 1 are the initial stage of any influential action in the market. It is required that the restricted context works as a catalyst for the buying decisions.

UBAs 2 – To Expand the Boundaries to Foster Growth

The UBAs 2 deal with the maximal strategy that drives the expansion of the boundaries of the possibilities for the potential customers. They are necessary when there are possibilities that are unknown by the customers.

UBAs 3 – To Ensure Results

The UBAs3 deal with the minimum strategy to ensure results. UBA 3 are focused on closing processes. They might close sales, generate leads, or whatever their objective is.

UBAs 4 – To Influence Buying Arguments

The UBAs4 are the synthesis of the integration of the context with the maximal strategies and the minimum strategies described before.

The Unicist Research Institute