Linking Segments to the
Marketplace
Market segmentation schemes are often used to identify
segments with especially good potential and allow companies or
organizations to strategically approach the marketplace. However, the
utility of any segmentation can be severely limited when the
segmentation scheme cannot be linked to specific households or
businesses.
Inability to link segments to the market is most
likely to occur when the core segmentators are psychological in nature
(e.g., attitudinal measures) or when the number of core segmentators
becomes large.
Anchored Segmentation
Anchored Segmentation is an innovative analytic approach to
address this recurrent problem in segmentation studies. With an
Anchored Segmentation, the database is classified into demographic
clusters. This is done by partitioning the database by factors such as
gender, age, household income or respondent education. In business to
business research, the sample may be partitioned by SIC Code, number
of employees, region and so forth.
Then, the segmentation analysis is performed using grouped data
defined by the demographic cluster. With this approach, any type or
number of core segmentors may be used to drive the segmentation
solution. However, households or businesses may be assigned to any
given segment by simply using the demographic information used to
construct the cluster (which we refer to this as the anchor key).
Anchor Segmentations Link Segments to the Market
Anchored Segmentation offer a simple method for linking any
given segmentation solution to the market. Moreover, the segmentation
solution may be exported to other databases that contain the
demographic information needed to construct the anchor key. This
allows past and future survey results to be examined for each segment
without requiring all core segmentors to be measured.
|
|
|
