McGraw-Hill's diverse user base — spanning educators, administrators, and students across multiple institutional contexts — had never been systematically segmented in a way that could guide product development, messaging, and go-to-market priorities. Without a clear segmentation framework, the company defaulted to generalist strategies that failed to serve any audience particularly well.
Vivaldi crafted a nuanced segmentation of McGraw-Hill's education ecosystem — integrating demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal variables to reveal distinct user personas across the key audience types. The segmentation provided a clear framework for where to invest and how to win across different audience segments.
The segmentation identified clear "where to play" and "how to win" recommendations across McGraw-Hill's key audiences — supporting more targeted and effective strategies for product development, messaging, and marketing investment across the company's education business.
McGraw-Hill engaged Vivaldi to systematically segment a user base spanning educators, administrators, and students across multiple institutional contexts that had never been mapped end to end. Vivaldi integrated demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal variables to build a segmentation with distinct user personas, supporting clearer “where to play” and “how to win” decisions for product development, messaging, and marketing investment.
McGraw-Hill is a global learning company and one of the world’s leading education publishers, founded in 1888 in New York City. Serving millions of students, educators, and professionals across K–12, higher education, and professional markets, McGraw-Hill has transformed from a traditional print publisher into a digital-first platform company with products including Connect, ALEKS, and SmartBook.
Vivaldi built a multi-audience segmentation that produced distinct user personas across McGraw-Hill’s educator, administrator, and student bases, then translated those personas into specific where-to-play and how-to-win recommendations. The framework supports more targeted product development, messaging, and marketing investment across the education business.
The team layered demographic data, which describes who the user is, with behavioral data on how they actually use education products, and attitudinal data on what they value and trust in the category. Combining those three layers produces personas that are usable for both product decisions and marketing decisions, because they describe behavior, not just identity.
Each of those audiences has a different role in the buying and adoption decision, administrators authorize, educators select and use, students consume, and the segmentation logic that works for one audience does not transfer to the others. A single generalized segmentation forces compromises that serve none of the three audiences particularly well, which is why multi-audience segmentation is now a baseline requirement in education publishing.
The lesson is that businesses with multiple decision-makers in the buying chain cannot rely on a single end-user segmentation, the framework has to acknowledge each role and build personas inside it. Companies that segment only the end user often discover their product and marketing investments are misaligned with how decisions actually get made, and the cost of that misalignment compounds over multi-year contract cycles.
