Segmentation was essential – we do not have resources for broadcast campaigns that stand out in our crowded market place – but one thing that our specialist programme has long made clear to us is that some mass-market segmentation techniques, based on demographics or buying history, for example, were  unlikely to be particularly informative. The fact that a given audience member lives in one part of London or booked for a certain show doesn’t make it noticeably more likely that their neighbours or fellow past bookers will attend in similar ways in the future. The motivations and values – what marketing theory terms ‘psychographic variables’ – of our audience may be more instructive.