In today’s complicated, competitive marketplace, it’s more important than ever to properly identify and segment your target audience. Understanding how key customer groups differ ensures that your customer experience improvements are more than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Our segmentation studies begin by defining the purpose and use of the segmentation, before the first questionnaire is ever written. We start by clearly understanding characteristics that will help identify the segments and distinguish one group from the next. The variables may include demographics, beliefs, attitudes, category perception, brand usage, media, and more.
Segment identification is the next phase of the segmentation study. Here, Maritz Research carefully brings both art and science to the process. With exploratory analysis and modeling on collected data, we are able to accurately label each segment, which will lead us to the most viable segmentation options.
Our Segmentation Viewer empowers you and your team with an easier way to compare one segment solution with another. The Viewer will help you analyze segment relevance, statistical validity, and each group's value, helping you zero in on the final segmentation solution.
This final step of our segmentation process culminates with the creation of a decision support system to examine the segmentation from all angles. From here we help you drive business development and growth with the delivery of clear segmentation definitions, sizes, profiles, value, and more. The Maritz Segmentation Assigner ensures that your segmentation investment continues to provide value by providing a tool to assign your customers to your segments with a few clicks.
By implementing a market segmentation study, Maritz Research helped a hospitality client better define its brand. The client had been operating without a clear strategy for its primary brand; the company knew how advertising dollars were being spent but not how that translated into brand awareness or revenue. Following brand and advertising awareness surveys, a new strategic plan was written that the company is still following today.
Market segmentation studies should ultimately inform marketing decisions. In order for this to happen, segments must be high quality (i.e., cluster members are similar to each other and clusters are distinct from other clusters) and effective in driving marketing tactics. Often, however, resultant segments do not satisfy the above requirements.