Customer-centric Segmentation

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Market Segmentation and Analysis Tool (Excel workbook). From a high-level, the goal of a marketing strategy is to identify a target market and develop a marketing mix that will appeal to those potential customers. Decisions regarding the ideal marketing mix can be organized in terms of Price, Promotion, Product, and Price. However, the goal is not to [read more]

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Rising competition and introduction of new ways of capturing large amounts of customer data has necessitated advancement in capabilities of organizations to foresee and fulfill customer needs and wants.

Ever more B2C concerns are going all-out to Design Customer-centric organizations.  Organizations pursuing Customer-centricity depend on some type of Market Segmentation.  Market Segmentations assist in understanding the customer more intimately.

This understanding has to be based on solid data.  Even though the collection of customer data is at its highest of all time, organizations are still finding it difficult to apply the insights being offered by Customer Segmentation to propel Change and enhance Performance.  This is the Customer Data Paradox.  With more customer data, it has ironically become more difficult to derive useful insights from the data.

Data-driven enterprises are sensing that their Segmentation endeavors have been unable to provide anything near the extent of benefit they should.  Cause for such failure is development of Segmentations founded on contradictory Business Purpose; purposes that are not widely comprehended or communicated or cannot be immediately acted upon.

Segmentation is indispensable to the process of dealing with the intricacies of constantly evolving and dividing customer clusters and their diverse demands.  Need for developing a company-wide Operating Model that is able to transform this extensive data into valuable information so as to enable improved Go-to-Market decisions is essential.

This intricate Segmentation process can be handled more effectively by following the 4-phase approach to Customer-centric Segmentation:

1. Delineate Purpose
2. Plan around Purpose
3. Functionalize Segmentation
4. Control Implementation

Segmentation offers clarity and insights regarding customer behavior, tendencies, and proclivities.

Customer Segmentation also amplifies the chances of effectiveness of Marketing and Customer Experience management campaigns, and impelling Brand Positioning and Product Development. 

Let us look at the 4 phases in detail. 

Delineate Purpose

Clearly defining and understanding the Purpose of Segmentation is necessary to set the base for the type of Segmentation effort that is required to be undertaken—i.e., Strategic or Tactical or both.

Strategic Segmentation is applied for all-embracing, enterprise-wide purposes.  Tactical Segmentation is adopted for a far more precise purpose.

Goal is to guarantee that Segmentation results in distinct processes and actions that augment Performance.

Plan around Purpose

Segmentation research needs to be meticulously planned to manifest the Purpose decided, and to make certain that the outcomes are insightful, practicable, and discernable.

Segmentation research has to encompass several dimensions such as behaviors, outlooks, demographics, channel use, inclinations, and profitability. 

Functionalize Segmentation

This phase involves determining changes that will take place in the decision processes and communicating them to the concerned business partners so as to deliberate on and devise adjusted metrics that reflect the new capabilities.

Control Implementation

Means for administering change—directed and customized communications arranged to stimulate understanding, interaction, and approval—are required to be utilized completely.

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