Susan Baier is the owner of Audience Audit, a research firm that specializes in attitudinal segmentation. Baier stopped by theCube at the recently concluded Tableau Customer Conference to explain what it is her company does and how Tableau’s software helped her boost the bottom line.

Baier is a marketing veteran with over 25 years of experience in brand management and strategic planning. She founded Audience Audit with the goal of providing marketers with the information they need to make effective decisions.

Historically, marketing professionals resorted to gut feeling and market segmentation for decision making. The latter technique involves dividing a target audience into different subsets based on traditional criteria such as age, location and financial status. This approach can be effective for identifying subgroups by common denominators, but isn’t nearly as helpful when it comes to understanding the consumer mindset. By contrast, attitudinal segmentation provides visibility into consumer needs by shedding light on the specific reasons an individual may be interested in a particular brand or product.

“More often than not we see comparable demographics across attitudinal segments. The reason is that people don’t make purchase decisions based on what they look like, or how old they are, or how much money they make,” Baier tells theCUBE hosts Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, explaining that “you can line up a bunch of people that all look exactly the same on paper and they’ll all want to go to someplace different for vacation. It’s because what they want out of a vacation is different.”

Continuing her line of thought, Baier highlights that an individual who is interested in outdoor attractions may choose a resort based on local weather, while a vacationer who is looking for indoor activities would have other considerations. For this reason, statistical analysis succeeds where narrow focus group studies fail.

According to Baier, 400 to 500 respondents constitute the minimal sample size in her line of work. The bigger the sample size the better, she adds, which is why Audience Audit does not charge clients per survey completion.

Asked to comment on the benefits of using Tableau software, Baier says that the company’s data visualization platform helped her reduce the average duration of projects from 12-16 weeks to a mere 6. As a result, Audience Audit can take not only up to eight times as many projects as it could before signing up with Tableau, but also charge 60 percent less.

To hear the full interview, click on the video below.