Segmentation may not seem to you like a short term tool for rapid response to changing market conditions. But it can be. You should review your current consumer segmentation and refresh it or re-draw it right now.
Why? Because consumers’ needs are changing and their attitudes are changing. There’s a post-crisis consumer whose needs are different from what they were a year ago. They’re becoming Post-materialists - people whose highest values have shifted from a sense of their own achievement and social recognition of their success to the primacy of responsibility and a sense of security.
| HOPES | |
|---|---|
| FROM (Growth Period) | TO (Post-Crisis) |
| Climbing the social ladder | Protecting the status quo |
| Demonstrating my achievement to others | Demonstrating my responsibility to myself and my inner circle |
| More riches | Richer experiences |
| Widening social network | Higher intensity, smaller circle |
| What’s next? | What’s important? |
| Feel richer | Be wiser |
| Show the world | Contribute to my inner circle |
| Change the world | Focus on MY world |
| Influence | Enrich |
| FEARS | |
|---|---|
| FROM (Growth Period) | TO (Post-Crisis) |
| Being left behind by others | Falling down on my responsibilities |
| How I am perceived by others | How I feel about myself |
As those of you who follow the discussions here at the web’s primary resource site for organic growth know, a shift in attitudes and needs causes changes in behavior. The behavior we observe is a change in spending habits.
- In grocery stores it’s a movement towards more purchasing of store brands.
- In fashion, it’s a shift to faster moving, lower price retailers and away from slower moving, higher priced stores.
- In the restaurant business, it’s a search for full service meals at “magic” price points like $9.99 and $7.99
These are behavioral observations. But to understand how to build brand share in this recession without simply blindly reducing prices, you need to understand the motivations behind these consumer behaviors. You need Insights - not just the “sight” of what’s going on in the store, but the “IN-sight” of what’s going on inside the consumer’s mind.
If you understand the post-crisis consumer, you might be able to steer them to other brands in your portfolio to preserve and even grow your total market share. You might be able to change your message in a way that re-balances your value proposition with a renewed focus on functional benefits that are relevant to your core target. This can reinforce the consumer logic of staying with your brand instead of being tempted to leave. Your insight might lead to a new collaborative strategy with retailers to create a win-win merchandizing and promotion approach in-store. Insights are the fuel for share building initiatives, especially in a recession.
Insights can only come from new and refreshed data. And the most important data input to your insights generation is the segmentation study that highlights the consumers’ shifting values, changing attitudes and new needs.
There are two ways to get this new segmentation data. The fastest way is “segmentation light” - a qualitative refreshment of your consumer knowledge gained by talking with the new post-crisis consumer. Use one-on-one’s, mini-groups and other qualitative data collection techniques that emphasize the depth and richness of data rather than the quantity of data. In the hands of EMM Group’s expert research team, this segmentation light” approach can deliver you a newly constructed needs-based segmentation in a very short period of time. With help from our segmentation experts, you can arrive at the relevant insights and new brand strategy fast (especially if you use our insights accelerator workshop).
If you feel that a quantitative study is required, we can design one for you quickly because our approach is proven for needs-based segmentation in the midst of shifting consumer attitudes. It will take you longer than “segmentation light” to get to a final report, but the resultant analysis will drive you quickly thereafter towards the relevant insights and action plan.
Whatever you decide, it’s imperative to re-segment now if you are seeing new styles of consumer and customer behavior in the marketplace. Otherwise your response will be uninformed and, if it involves pricing policy, you will run the real risk of excessive costs both in terms of short term revenue loss and long term brand equity erosion.
Re-segment Now