How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 3: Identify Unmet Needs

Strategic segmentation is a process for developing strategies that appealing to specific customer groups, increasing you effectiveness in serving that group in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. The first two steps in the strategic segmentation process are to identify key audience characteristics that define subgroups and to understand the core motivations that influence how those subgroups will engage with your organization.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process is to identify any unmet needs that represent an opportunity (or a threat) for you to serve those customers. Unmet needs are important because they are the source of discontent (whether known or not) that will cause someone to want to change. If that person is already a customer, then unmet needs can be a threat because it may be their relationship with you that they change.

Creative Thinking for Dummies

There is a lot being written these days about the role of creativity in business and ministry. I get the feeling that creativity is viewed as the Holy Grail of skills.

The truth is that everyone is capable of being creative. Yes, there are those who are extremely gifted, but these people are hardly worthy of being idolized.

Here are three principles for effective creative thinking that any individual or organization can follow:

1. Separate Ideation from Evaluation

How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 2: Understand Customer Motivations

We’ve covered how strategic segmentation can help you develop effective strategies for appealing to specific customer groups in a way that is both profitable and sustainable. At this point you’ve identified key audience characteristics that allow you to both classify subgroups of your audience and inform ways that you can relate to those groups with your products and services.

The next step in the strategic segmentation process is to understand the different motivations that lie behind their decisions and behaviors.

Understanding Customer Motivations

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How To Do Strategic Segmentation – Step 1: Segment The Market

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. (more…)...

Strategy Principles – Segmentation

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… (more…)...

Strategy Principles – Picking The Right Tool

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.

Strategy Principles – Looking From Different Angles

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 ...

Strategy Principles – Simplicity

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:

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.

Coordination. Smooth coordination is critical to finding simple solutions to the problems you’re trying to solve.

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