Kingdom Strategist

Strategic segmentation is a technique for analyzing your customers/audience in order to develop unique strategies for serving customer groups that share common characteristics. The value of segmentation is it provides clarity about how you can best appeal to specific customers and what it will take to develop and maintain valuable relationships with them.

So how do you go about strategic segmentation?

Like all things strategy, you can do a little or you can do a lot depending on your needs, sophistication and available resources. What I’m going to present is a general outline for performing a segmentation, you can do as much or as little in each step as is appropriate for your needs. (continue reading…)

What is Strategic Segmentation?

Segmentation is the strategic identification of different customer/audience groups.

The purpose of segmentation is to identify the best approach/offering for different customer segments by better understanding their behaviors, motivations, and needs.

The key to effective segmentation is to identify groups based on differences in how they respond to your offerings.

Let me explain that a bit… (continue reading…)

The other day I was cooking a quick dinner for my family. We have two small children (a one year old and a two year old), so “quick” is critical to our dinner preparation. I needed to cut up some chicken so I reached over to our knife block to grab the necessary tool. Instead of grabbing the 7″ Santoku or the 8″ chef’s knife, I grabbed a steak knife. As I was doing so, the following conversation occurred in my head:

Me: “That’s not the best knife for cutting chicken.”
Also me: “We’re using the steak knife.”
Me: “Bad idea.”
Also me: “We’re using the steak knife.”
*Kid yells and our attention refocuses on getting dinner ready.

That’s the set up to this story: I’m tired, hurried, and distracted. And I just grabbed a tool that I know isn’t designed for what I’m doing… How do you think this story ends?

(continue reading…)

I was reminded of this by a post I read on Abraham Piper’s blog. Earlier this year, Target introduced a new look for it’s private label, commodity product lines. The brand is called “up&up” and has received a lot of positive attention from the design world.

From a consumer’s perspective, I personally welcomed the change as the new brand distracts me from the reality that we shop at Target because we do not have excess discretionary income and they sell mostly quality products. The new brand really emphasizes the quality of Target’s products when compared to other low-cost competitors (like Walmart or Meijer in the mid-west). The message is clear: “up”; which has a positive connotation (i.e. “Things are looking up.”)

Strategically, the new brand seems like a great concept that aligns with how Target approaches its market. No problem, right?

Look at the new logo upside down:

It’s still a clean, aesthetically pleasing design. But now it says “down”.

Is this catastrophic? No. But the brand message is lost every time Target product gets placed upside down in the consumers home. For me, all I see now is “dn&dn”. Probably not what Target’s marketing team wanted.

As strategists, it’s our job to shine light on the unintended and unexpected by asking “What would this look like from a different angle?”

In order to be effective, good strategy must be simple.

Simple to understand.

Simple to communicate.

Simple to execute.

As strategists, our job is to achieve simplicity while not sacrificing the quality in our content or purpose. We are the ones who lead people to the simplicity that exists on the far side of complexity.

Today’s Management Tip of the Day from the Harvard Business Review presents three C’s to help you and your organization eliminate complexity and achieve simplicity:

1. Collaboration. Silos are the enemy of simplicity. Work across the organization to identify where the complexity is and together improve the way business is done.
2. Coordination. Smooth coordination is critical to finding simple solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve.
3. Communication. Once you’ve gotten rid of complexity, you can be sure it will try to find its way back in. Open and regular communication will allow you to identify it before it takes hold.

One thing they point out is that simple doesn’t necessarily mean easy. Our goal as kingdom strategists is to find creative and effective ways to share Christ and advance the kingdom. It is our duty to remove as much friction from the process as possible because we do not want to create any unnecessary obstacles for the people we are serving. We have an obligation make whatever we do as simple as possible, even it doing so makes our situation harder.

You can read the full article here.

Image: http://lawsofsimplicity.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/switch_lg.jpg