Grow your business with consumer-driven insights

We’re excited to welcome Thierry to the boobook team as a senior insights director. With over two decades of experience in the insights industry, spanning both qualitative and quantitative methods, he brings a deep understanding of a wide range of business questions and how to address them. Thierry has worked across a broad range of sectors with one end goal in mind: delivering clear insights so clients can tailor their products and services to the needs of their customers. Helping businesses thrive is what it’s all about.

What sets him apart? A fascination with human behaviour and a passion for turning complex data into clear direction. Whether he’s solving pricing questions, segmentation issues or other complex business challenges, a project isn’t finished until the insights are put into action.

Turning variety into strategic advantage

Even after more than twenty years, Thierry is still hooked. “I love this job, and I’m excited to put my expertise to work in this challenging new environment”, he explains. “One thing I particularly enjoy is the variety. It’s been a privilege to get to know so many sectors and businesses in depth. Every project brings something new. I’ve never wanted to limit myself to just one sector because there’s so much value in cross-industry thinking. What you learn in one context can often spark unexpected insights in another.”

Driving businesses towards meaningful change

Coming from a larger agency, Thierry was ready for a change. “I look forward to being part of this tight-knit team and staying involved in projects from start to finish,” he says. “The boobook team brings together a wide range of expertise. Working closely together, combining our strengths, and aiming for the highest quality in everything we deliver that’s what makes this next step so exciting for me.”

He thoroughly enjoys delving into complex business questions, particularly in an international context. “The most rewarding projects are those where you can have an impact on a strategic level. Contrary to what some people still think, our work doesn’t revolve around delivering reports. We want to bring the research results to life. To do so, you need a solid understanding of your client’s business context and the challenges they’re facing. It’s just as important to consider how those insights will land within the company. That’s where storytelling and workshops come into play. Translating data into a story people can connect with is a part of the process I deeply enjoy.”

Beyond the professional

Thierry has been intrigued by the workings of the human mind for as long as he can remember. “That’s why I decided to study psychology,” he recalls. “While I’ve never worked as a psychologist, it still proves incredibly valuable. Understanding what drives people and how they make decisions is at the heart of meaningful consumer insights.”

With two sons who are growing up fast, he loves spending time with them and his wife. When he’s not working or spending time with his family, you’ll most likely find him on his bike, clearing his head, or on the pitch, playing football.

“It's an exciting time for insights professionals,” Thierry concludes. “The world keeps changing rapidly. It hasn’t stopped since COVID-19, and it isn’t likely to stabilise any time soon. Businesses need consumer insights with a larger shelf life, grounded in a solid understanding of customer needs, expectations and behaviour.”

Feel free to connect with Thierry on LinkedIn if you’d like to discuss today’s erratic consumer landscape, or football.

While it’s true that no two people are identical, we’re also not as unique as we’d like to believe. That’s what makes segmentation so powerful. If you succeed in understanding the distinct needs, preferences and behaviours of different groups within your customer base, you’re well on your way to boosting business results.

Not convinced? Leading consultancy firm McKinsey found that personalisation can lift revenues by 5 to 15%, highlighting the impact of tailored marketing and services in driving engagement and sales. Segmentation is definitely the path to personalisation but, as our colleague Eva Vandenberge highlighted during her recent talks at UBA and MIE’25, many companies struggle to make it work.

Below are three key challenges shared by her audience and some insights that will help you tackle them.

1. How can we ensure other teams actually use our segmentation?

Developing a technically sound segmentation might not even be your biggest challenge when building a segmentation model. This frustration shared by one company might be familiar: they meticulously analysed the data, tested various models, and confidently delivered what they believed was a solid customer segmentation, only to watch it gather dust because the different teams barely used it.

We’ve seen it all too often: even the most robust segmentation can fail if it’s not actionable and adopted across the organisation. Too many companies rush into the process and overlook a couple of crucial steps. Our 5-step approach will ensure your well-crafted model doesn’t suffer this unfortunate fate.

1. Discover & learn

Talk to all relevant stakeholders to ensure you understand their needs and how they currently work with customer data. You can hardly expect them to use a segmentation if it doesn’t fit their needs exactly.

2. Plan for success

This stage is all about gaining stakeholder buy-in and building an ambassador team. You won’t be able to tackle all needs and questions at once. You’ll need to prioritise and make tough choices all stakeholders agree upon.

3. Collect & develop

You’ve finally arrived at the nitty-gritty part of the process. Only now will you start building a model based on internal data and possibly additional qualitative and quantitative research, depending on the needs you’ve agreed upon.

4. Share & adapt

Have your stakeholders validate the segmentation model you’ve built, and refine or adapt it based on their feedback. Consider a test run that clearly demonstrates the added value of the segmentation for all teams.

5. Implement & adopt

Implementing your segmentation should be much easier when you’ve successfully gone through the previous steps. But remember: segmentation is a journey. Keep it alive by regularly sharing success stories from different teams. Follow up on trends and consider a re-run when market conditions shift, your offering or strategy evolves, the segmentation becomes less actionable, or stakeholders indicate it's no longer meeting their needs.

Our work at boobook is not limited to collecting and developing segmentation models. We can support you through the entire process from stakeholder interviews to organising workshops to support your teams when they start implementing the model.

“By combining strategic guidance with practical support, we ensure your segmentation strategy is embraced across teams and effectively translated into actionable insights that drive results.” - Eva Vandenberge

2. How can we integrate attitudinal and motivational variables into our CRM database for improved targeting?

Internal data serves as a good starting point for your segmentation, but it will only get you so far. You’ll be able to define your segments in terms of demographics and behaviour, but not needs, attitudes and motivations. These are often precisely the variables that will make your segmentation more actionable, as they are an excellent starting point for your positioning, product development and marketing and communication efforts.

A carefully crafted research design will allow you to build a much more granular segmentation, but to target the identified segments you must ensure to integrate these new insights into your CRM database. Our data analysts are experts on the matter. They will either:

1. Combine your internal data and newly gathered consumer insights into one single, yet comprehensive predictive model.
2. Build a nested segmentation model, as we did for Telenet. This model proved invaluable in finetuning their CRM targeting to better serve their customers.

3. And what about AI?

Another topic that inevitably came up during Eva’s sessions was AI. We don’t recommend using it to develop your segmentation model. Currently at least, there are no real benefits, and AI's tendency to hallucinate can undermine the reliability of your model. We do believe AI can add value in other ways.

“That’s why the boobook team has developed an AI chatbot to help you engage with yoursegments. This tool allows you to have conversations with your segments,sparking new insights and fresh ideas on how to approach them.” - Eva Vandenberge

‍

Discover Telenet’s award-winning approach in action: watch the recording of our webinar on customer segmentation.

Curious about how we can support you in bringing segmentation to life? Reach out to our team!