SEGMENTATION

AM | @MackinlayEuruni

Sources. Evelyn Ehrlich & Duke Fanelli. The financial services marketing handbook. Tactics and techniques that produce results. Bloomberg, 2012, chapter 1 (pp. 19-29). Mike Mancini: "Segmentation and Customer Loyalty: Using Segmentation to Strenghten Customer Loyalty", The Nielsen Company, 2009.
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. Segmentation is the most basic marketing strategy.

. Segmentation has always sought to answer four fundamental questions: [1] Who are my customers? [2] What are they like? [3] Where can I find more of them? [4] What channels and messages should I use to connect with them?

. More questions: Which organizations do business with your company? Can your clients be further divided into those that are in solid relationships and those that need to be cultivated? Can clients by analyzed by the types of products they currently buy and others that they may need?

. Targeting. Targeting is picking the actual market segments you want to go after. The benefits of targeting include the following: (1) It helps you identify the media that best reach your target segments; (2) It helps build referral business: the network effect!

. Life-cycle Segmentation. Consumers' needs change as they enter different phases of the life cycle. In the fund management business, that means shifting gradually from a heavy emphasis on risk and growth (equities), to a more balanced approach that adds fixed-income and dividend-paying stocks. Vanguard has launched the Vanguard Target Retirement Funds to allow investors to gradually become more conservative as the year of retirement approaches—reducing risk automatically.
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