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Market Segmentation Services
We are a market research firm with a special focus on market segmentation. We provide consulting, and excellent quantitative and qualitative research. We offer a full range of market research techniques to help you respond to competitive challenges in the marketplace.
We partner with marketing managers, brand managers and agencies, to advise and assist with creating market strategies and materials. We consult with you as you develop and work through your own process, or we provide the services directly.
Our primary interest is in effective segmentation studies and services, as this builds profit by appropriate positioning for your offerings, and provides actionable strategies for your most rewarding markets.
We offer consulting, and the following services:
Analysis of Current Marketing Strategy: We can help determine where your organization is now, and work with you to determine where you want to go. This can be done formally with an audit, or informally through interviews.
Project Management: Segmentation studies require a strong project leader with significant attention to detail. We are expert at maintaining both levels of attention and can guide you through this process, or do it for you.
Study Design: Segmentation studies begin by defining objectives. We generally begin with a conversation with you about the purpose and vision behind your current marketing. Then we help formulate the study: strategy, objectives, design, data collection, data analysis and reporting.
Data Collection: Assessment tools are the core of this process, and are described in more detail below.
Analysis: Data is turned into information and then turned into actionable strategies. Analysis answers why your customers are doing something, you will be able to do more of what you've been doing correctly, less of what may not have been working for you, and find new ways of working effectively to get you what you want.
Report Generation: Typically, an executive summary, containing key points of analysis and recommendations, is presented to senior management. This is followed by a full report.
Implementation: Turning valuable data into strong marketing appeals isn't an automatic process. By staying with the process through subsequent developmental stages and helping translate findings into messages and images, we can help you turn the process into a smooth, rapid, and winning one. Our goal is to do all that we can to help you achieve clear and remarkable business success, not simply to generate raw data and leave you wondering what to do with it.
Assessments
Market Segmentation Services has a series of proprietary assessment tools developed over many years that helps us get a quick and comprehensive picture of a client's marketing effectiveness. We focus in particular on the state of market segmentation and positioning, and how the existing market segmentation situation supports or inhibits the company's business goals. The primary tools are surveys, interviews and focus groups; observation and interaction, and informational research are also used.
Surveys
Surveys are one of the three leading tools used in traditional marketing; they have many forms, sizes, and degrees of depth. We have considerable expertise and experience with them all and are able to help clients develop and conduct a wide range of surveys.
In the case of market segmentation, we have customized survey tools and formats that are especially helpful in getting actionable information for client. Our experience in psychographics in particular allows us to sift out the common survey responses which do not match up with subsequent respondent and consumer behavior.
Interviews
Our interviews are customized to corporate goals. They are focused on quickly and sharply delineating relevant market segment information, and especially geared to getting responses that predict consumer behavior.
Our interviewing approaches, like our survey and focus group approaches, are wide in form and scope. We do in-depth face-to-face interviews, and also use web-based and videoconferencing formats, email interviews and surveys.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are the third key approach to gathering consumer information. Technology has developed to the point where online focus groups are effective. Participant responses are recorded digitally, with real-time online observation by company principals as an option.
The core fundamentals remain:
Incisive questions
Insightful development of themes
Careful observation of reactions
Empathy between the person conducting the focus group and those participating.
Focus groups are an especially useful information gathering tool because we can see not just individual responses but how social influence shapes and builds, and sometimes masks, individual responses. Consumer behavior is not the behavior of separate disconnected individuals. People are an organic part of the society and social circles they belong to, and their purchasing decisions are strongly influenced by that. Focus groups let us see how those interactions operate, and provide data that is available through no other means.
Observation and Interaction
Self reporting of consumer opinions on a formal basis is valuable and can provide important data. But observing consumers actually interact with products or seeing how they react to promotions in real life can provide information and insights available at a much different level.
These methods can be applied in both covert and overt modes. People will tell casual acquaintances things that they will not tell a formal interviewer about a product or its usage or what they look for in such products in general. The results of such real life experience can provide consumer insight of the highest importance and relevance.
Informational Research
There is a wealth of relevant information that affects how the marketplace receives a product or service. Although consumers are an important source of such information, a wide range of other significant sources exists.
One of the richest sources of information provided by market research and market segmentation research is, quite simply, research. Direct study of the consumer is valuable in and of itself. But when it includes information about the state of the economy, the nature of the competition, the political and regulatory conditions, and the detailed history of earlier or similar marketing efforts, it is a far richer data lode to mine.
Market Segmentation Training
We make the distinction in our work between training and workshops, and offer both:
Training involves strategic presentations about segmentation
Workshops facilitate your process of realizing business objectives
Our training is offered three times a year as a public two-day workshop, and is geared to brand managers, business owners and marketing managers. It is a workshop for how to use marketing segmentation in strategic planning and decision making, to be profitable and competitive in your market.
Our workshops are customized to the client situation, and include hands-on training for those actually involved in market segmentation. Topics range from how to hire marketing consultants and agencies, to how to design segmentation research, how to gather and analyze the data, and how to turn data into useful information and effective message development. Workshops are typically conducted in conjunction with an actual market segmentation study, at the client location.
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