Market Segmentation In Customer Persona

Market Segmentation

The concept of market segmentation was developed by Wendel Smith in 1956. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad market into groups of customers with similar needs. This allows us to target our marketing to this subsection and improve the likelihood of sending the right message to the right customer (Smith, 1956). It has been described as an essential concept of modern marketing (Wind, 1978). It was further defined as an approach that divides total marketing demand into relatively similar segments based on the following variables (Tynan, 1987):

• Geographic; Location based

• Demographic; age, gender, occupation

• Psychographic; social class (e.g. marketing grade c2de for lower income customers)

• Customer

(Baker & Hart, 2008) Customer Persona

A customer persona is a fictitious representation of a market segment based on an amalgamation of needs and preferences of the market segment for communication purposes (Pruitt & Adlin, 2006). The Customer Persona is a “thumbnail description of a type of person” for which different customer journey maps or scenario are developed to understand our customer and their needs and wants (Chaffey et al., 2009). They are created from market research, or data about a customer segment.

By creating a representation in the form of a persona the message is stronger. Personas were originally developed by (Cooper, 1999), since then have been integrated into the design processes of numerous service marketing, software firms and consultancy practices, for example SAP and Microsoft. They have become a key element in User Experience or UX design.

Even though personas are not real people, but a representation of a group of customers with a common need, they start with a name of the fictitious customer and a

It will analyse the personas or customers emotional response, needs, goals, motivations and pain points or gaps in service at each of these interactions during the Customer experience.

(Shostack, 1984) Describes the service blueprint, precursor to Customer Journey Maps, as a method to explore all the issues involved in creating or managing a service. The benefits of the Customer Journey map are that they are more precise and a better communication tool than a textual description of the service delivery, and less open to misinterpretation. They also in addition to Customer Personas put the customer at the focus point of the design. The designers of the service are encouraged to take into account the customers feelings, emotions, and needs in the design. Again it moves the team away from the comfort zone of solving a technical problem and to focus on delivering real customer value. The approach also avoids us taking an inside out approach, listening to internal business expectations of what customer needs are, or focusing on what our existing (often diverse) channels provide. The Customer Journey map describes the “moments of truth” or points where customers and employees interact, and the customer experience can be impacted (Carlzon, 1989). At these points we need