Market segments - resources

Business to business marketing is more complex than marketing to consumers. Although techniques such as branding, can be transferred successfully from consumer marketing, B2B is more involved with layers of decision making, hierarchies, channels and advisors to navigate.

In business-to-business markets (B2B) customers purchase in more structured ways often with specialist buying units and not just individuals and ideas like 'value-in-use' more than pure pricing. The purchase it typically for long term, so marketing is more focused on customer relationships via account managers than is normally true for consumer markets.

Technology markets are characterised by rapid change and complicated relationships between suppliers, developers and end consumers and challenges of scale and pricing. An unusual feature of technology markets are network effects combining platform, developers, advertisers and consumers as a mutually-supporting eco-system.

This means that a specialist approach is needed to understand how to win and hold customers looking to products that are not yet understood by consumers, while building relationships with suppliers and developers.

Healthcare encompasses markets from pharmaceutical and development of medications, to medical devices, and on to service providers.

Our projects help businesses navigate the complex structures to identify how efficacy and efficiency drive decisions and recommendations on medicines, devices, processes and protocols to ensure the right products are tested, and taken through approval processes using techniques like conjoint analysis.

Segmentation is comparatively simple to carry out from a market research or analysis viewpoint using statistical tools to identify different groups within a market or among customers. However, making a segmentation strategy work involves more than just data classification.

In particular, the business has to be aligned to the segments to ensure each segment has appropriate products and services, and each segments needs to be clearly identified for targeting, and tracked over time to measure performance. Many pure market research segmentations fail once the research money has been spent, because the business short-circuited the implementation phase required to deliver a successful segmentation.