Marketing and all things related

During my career in marketing, I had the opportunity to work with many global and national organizations.  In fact, several of those companies were some of the largest in the world.  With size comes budget, and with budget comes too many people with not enough to do trying to justify the need for their positions.  Of course, this is a generalization, but if you’ve worked in corporate America, you know what I mean. 

At one point in my career I witnessed a client (a national, well-recognized company) create the most insanely intricate segmentation of their customer base that only a rocket scientist could make sense of it.  They would send direct mail to their customers and segment the mailing into extremely small groups to test the response rate of different versions changing only one or two minor words or the color of a tiny picture. 

Now, I’m all for segmenting and determining your target audience and most valuable customers.  There is amazing value in having that information and using it to create effective messages, new products, marketing campaigns, etc., but when does the time come that too much information is actually detrimental to a company’s marketing and sales efforts?  I’m not sure exactly where the line should be drawn, but at some point, I do think someone needs to put their foot down and speak with a voice of reason.  Breaking customers down into over 300 segments may be too much.  When is too much information not a good thing?