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Market segmentation encompasses any and all activities that firms engage in to identify groups of customers within a larger market. Segmentation is based on the observation that people are different, and these differences often result in profit opportunities.
Download – Driving Insight with Segmentation (pdf)
Articles by David Bakken
The Flavour of Insights
You have a marketing problem and use $50,000 to spend on research. How do you decide whether to do qualitative research, quantitative research, or both? Most of us use a few simple heuristics to make this decision, taking into account how much we already know, urgency, and whether we need to project our findings to a larger target market.
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This article was first published in Research World, the magazine for marketing intelligence & decision making published by ESOMAR. For more details go to http://www.esomar.org/researchworld.
Visualize It: Agent-based simulations may help you make better marketing decisions
No doubt you have seen someone wearing the brightly colored, clog- like plastic footwear called Crocs. The story of Crocs is the stuff of which marketing fables are made. Three friends go sailing; one is wearing a pair of funky boat shoes made by a small company in Canada. The three friends decide to launch a business distributing these shoes. They introduce the shoe at a boat show. Crocs take off, and within a very few years, the founders take the company public. As of this writing, the stock is trading at three to four times the initial public offering price.
Download Visualize It: Agent-based simulations may help you make better marketing decisions (pdf) Marketing Research, Winter 2007
The Quest for Emerging Customer Needs
In today’s rapidly changing markets, companies have more impetus than ever to find emerging customer needs that will translate to new profit opportunities. Historically, market research has done a poor job of detecting emerging needs and identifying those profit opportunities. New customer needs originate upstream of the marketplace in changing customer circumstances. Unfortunately, almost all research is directed at finding new needs within an existing value exchange framework, using tools that aren’t well-suited for revealingemergingcustomer needs.
Download The Quest for Emerging Customer Needs (pdf) Marketing Research, Winter 2001
It is a very professional organization which has a strong knowledge of market research principles and importantly an intellectual interest in maximizing the value of the research. But they are able to balance this with a pragmatic operation that recognizes when idealized research is not merited.