Page 125 - MYM 2016

consumer goods company, working on practical segmentation with senior teams from leading global multinationals down to SMEs for 40 years, I nd much of the academic debate referred to above somewhat arrogant and inward-looking.
I say this because anyone who says “we seg- ment markets by...” is totally missing the point. Any market, once correctly de ned in terms of needs rather than products, consists of 100% of what is bought, how it is used and why it is bought and used in these ways. e supplier’s role is to understand these behavioral patterns and discover their ratio- nale, rather than try to impose some predetermined segmentation methodology onto the market.
A propos the issue of whether new channels, new media, new technology and the subsequent changing behaviors has made traditional segmenta- tion obsolete, the answer is a resounding “No.”
Fig. 5, at le , shows some of the ndings of a research club at Cran eld sponsored by IBM. It spells out the buying stages of consumers/customers and the di erent channels available to marketers.
Figures 6 and 7 illustrate this buying process (please note it is dyadic, or interactive, rather than the outdated AIDA notion, which assumes that con- sumers react to inputs). e gures represent the actual buying process of two out of ten segments for
a global travel company. is interactive buying pro- cess is listed in the vertical le -hand column in the gures. On the horizontal axis with the shaded areas below are represented the segment’s actual behaviors. Although these have been disguised for con den- tiality reasons, even a cursory glance would reveal that unless the real world behaviors of people in each segment were understood, any so-called “integrated communications” would be completely misdirected.
is view was con rmed in a McKinsey online article on B2B digital marketing dated July 26th
2016. It said: “a B2B customer will regularly use six di erent channels throughout the purchase process and two thirds come away frustrated by inconsistent experiences. A customer journey di ers by customer segment, with needs and expectations varying at each stage.”
Summary
is article is not aiming to spell out the cor- rect processes for carrying out proper needs-based segmentation, but rather to reinforce, for a new generation of marketers, the fact that rarely is any kind of marketing e ective without it and that it has become even more important with the advent of new technology.
The Sun Worshippers
MarketiNg strategY
fig. 6: buying process of
a customer segment of a global travel company, nicknamed “the sun Worshippers”
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