What is the proper customer segmentation generally accepted?
how does business in manufacturing make a customer segmentation?
how does business in service make a customer segmentation?
how does business in marketing make a customer segmentation?
Answer
Date: February 12th, 2008
3 questions in one. Wow! Before I answer this one, I must tell you that I'm not an expert in the science of segmentation. Yes, it is a science, and plenty of big books have been written about it.
The idea is to segment markets into distinct subsets that are similar in their needs and/behaviors. They need to be more or less the same, if they are to respond in a similar way to marketing communications.
What I can tell you is how businesses I worked for were segmenting their customers.
In the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) marketing, I've seen these types of segmentation:
- Age demographic - some products are catered to an older demographic, others are targeting youth etc. How the market is segmented on age is usually the same as how marketing research firms are segmenting.
- Gender - Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars... the differences are reflected in marketing campaigns
- Geography - What country? What state? What province? What zip code? These geography segments are also linked to the general wealth of people living within that part of Earth.
- Product adoption - Early adopters vs. followers etc.
- Race - This is particularly visible when companies are marketing to specific enthic groups
- Income - No need to market high-end electronic equipment to people who barely manage to get food on the table!
- Family life cycle - you market different products/solutions/services to families with kids in their diapers then to older people with grown up kids.
There are many more ways to segment consumers. Just keep in mind that any subset with similar behaviors and/or needs can be targeted in your communication.
I don't have much experience in Business-to-Business (B2B) marketing, but undoubtedly they segment their market as well, probably on (type of) industry, size (employees, percentage of market, turnover, profit), and previous business (turnover and profit made with this customer).
As said, I'm not the expert on this... anyone with more background on this is invited to share their opinion.
At your service,
Erwin.
