Market Segmentation
How do you tailor your product or service offerings to be most attractive to the markets you serve?
Beacon's experts will create a targeted study according to the questions that you want answered. The sections below include examples of questions asked by our clients and the insights we provided to help them make sound business decisions.
What are the various maturity or adoption levels for your class of products or services?
| CLIENT NEED | To examine how technology maturity or sophistication impact marketplace acceptance of the client's new products. |
| BACKGROUND | A Beacon client wanted to examine how quickly large companies were adopting new digitized methods for dealing with storage and business continuity issues and concerns. |
| BEACON'S RESEARCH | The study conducted by Beacon targeted decision makers of information management services across multiple industry and company size quotas. The sample design allowed Beacon to determine adoption patterns as well as the prioritization for each initiative. For this research, we worked with our strategic business partner ReRez and used segmentation analysis to interpret the data. |
| HOW WE HELPED | Beacon's research showed evidence of five distinct segments of companies, each of which had a distinct place in the digitization or maturation of their internal processes. The client was then able to incorporate these findings into its sales and marketing plans. |
How can you tailor your services and messaging to appeal to various groups?
| CLIENT NEED | To have a better understanding of user groups to help the client tailor its marketing and messaging. |
| BACKGROUND | An online auction company wanted to help its advertising and sponsorship customers plan strategies and messaging campaigns that would attract and influence the hundreds of thousands of clients in its extensive user community. |
| BEACON'S RESEARCH | The firm gave Beacon permission to mine its user database and weblogs. As a result of this access, Beacon was able to detect distinct groups of users, all showing uniquely different site behaviors (frequency, types of use, time spent). After using statistical models to code and classify the entire database of users into one of the six categories, Beacon also grafted results of an online survey with these same users to gain further insights into user attitudes, psychographics and prospective behaviours. Market research tools that we used included segmentation and data mining. |
| HOW WE HELPED | Six distinct user communities were revealed through this analysis. The deeper explication of these six segments of users helped marketers plan their strategies and messaging campaigns to attract and influence the site's user communities. |
How does your position change across buyer segments?
| CLIENT NEED | To review the appeal of its solution across its target markets. |
| BACKGROUND | A software firm needed to review its market position and the status of its particular solution, as well as those of competing firms. |
| BEACON'S RESEARCH | Beacon surveyed design engineering staff and management using or selecting electronic design automation (EDA) tools in North America, the UK, India and Germany. We used MaxDiff conjoint to examine value proposition elements and segment the utility results into distinct groups of users. Other research tools included correspondence analysis. |
| HOW WE HELPED | The results of the analysis showed that the client was strong in two of the three user segments. The firm was distinctly weaker that its competitors in the third user segment, which displayed entirely different importance ratings on the value proposition. Beacon was able to assist the client with ideas on how to most effectively reform its message to appeal to the third user group in which it had a less than stellar position. |
How do different groups of individuals interact with your web site?
| CLIENT NEED | To determine how different audiences or communities used the client's website, and how it could be made more useful. |
| BACKGROUND | A large enterprise software vendor was implementing a website redesign and needed to determine how they could best meet the needs of the different groups of IT and business professionals who would use the site to perform multiple tasks. |
| BEACON'S RESEARCH | Beacon conducted eight exploratory in-person focus groups, including IT managers and above, to better understand what types of people visited the software vendor's website and what content they were specifically looking for. |
| HOW WE HELPED | The discussions, which were very focused, illuminated five distinct personas among the various IT and business executives that would visit the site. Resources and navigation aids were therefore added to appeal to each of the five groups. From a design perspective, the website needed to add role-based navigation to its menu alongside functional navigation. It was confirmed through the research that IT managers and staff were increasingly apt to use forums and social networks to get answers to their questions. The firm altered its site design to incorporate greater openness to online communities and forums. |
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