Random: Marketing Theory

Customer Relationship Management

True Customer Relationship Management requires a firm understanding of all aspects of the customer's relationship with your organization - and segmentation is a great foundation for that understanding. Typical database marketing segments address issues which are directly available or may be inferred from information contained in customer databases. For example, database segmentation solutions often address: Who is you customer, What customers buy from you. When they make their purchases, How often they make their purchases, The value they create for you.

However, in order to fully understand the customer - their behaviors and motivations - we must also understand aspects of the relationship that are not readily available within the database - customer attitudes. These include:  How customers think about you and the competition, Why customers purchase from you, and Why customers purchase from the competition.

Attitudinal Segmentation

The new truth I am referring to is the truth of the segmentation by attitude. Attitudinal segmentation, if you please! We have segmented our consumers for long on the basis of the traditional parameters that have lasted a lifetime. Men think different from the women? Yes. In the old days. There are huge islands of each in the other. And that is a truth.

Young people in the age group of 14-34 think very differently from those in the 35-50 age group? Yes. Again in the old days of mass-customer typification. People in rural areas react differently to a marketing stimulus. Differently than those modern blokes living in our metropolises? Yes. Again in the very old days of our marketing infancy. Just look around and view with seriousness the tools we still use of mass-market segmentation for our brands of tampons and toothpaste alike. How do we still define our target-group? Urban, educated, female, aged between 14-25?


The case for attitudinal segmentation I make speaks of a truth as it is emerging in the Indian marketplace. People cannot be clubbed into artificial categories anymore. People are people. Diverse, exposed to the same media stimulus all over, well-connected to the world at large! The consumer today is less of a carefully cultivated mass being. He is more diverse. She has an attitude. And most of the time, it is all her own. Not governed by the geographical territory she occupies, not dictated by the age-bracket she finds herself born into, and certainly not dictated by the constraints of her income. Attitude is attitude. Attitude resides in diverse locations. Across clusters of apparently similar looking and feeling consumers. Yes, this very same attitude of Gowramma in remote Gajanur resides possibly in a Mrs Sarah Pillai in Tiruvananthapuram, in Mr Cyrus Topiwala residing in Colaba, and possibly even in a Ruth Robinson in far away Monte Carlo! And this is a target-segment. A positioning possibility as well!

References:

1. http://www.cac-group.com/SegNews3_Article1.html

2. http://www.tata.com/company/Articles/inside.aspx?artid=zSdqrBaTJeQ=