To get to know your customers better, it makes sense to create detailed target group profiles. For this purpose, customers are divided into segments. The allocation to these segments is made on the basis of features that are characteristic of the individual segments and help to make product improvements and new developments tailored to the relevant target groups. In addition, they make it possible to design communication measures that are appropriate for the target group. Ideally, a customer segmentation is preceded by a market definition and a market segmentation. The market definition defines the relevant market, which is then divided into segments.

We usually create customer segmentations on the basis of data from quantitative surveys. These are suitable for presenting socio-demographic characteristics of the most important target groups as well as, on a higher level, behavioural and need characteristics as profiles. With cluster-analytical procedures, we uncover similarity structures in data sets and group them in such a way that the differences between the respondents who are assigned to a group or “cluster” are as small as possible (homogeneous clusters) and the differences between the clusters are as large as possible (heterogeneous clusters). Depending on the objective, the clusters can be formed on the basis of demographic, psychographic or topic- and product-specific variables. In practice, there are various methods to choose from that are suitable for customer segmentation depending on the question and the data basis. intervista has extensive experience in customer segmentation and will be happy to advise you on your questions.

If you would like to gain deeper insights into needs, answering questions such as “What would be the ideal offer?”, “What are the weaknesses and strengths of our offer?”, “What are the pain points of our customers and how could these be eliminated?”, we recommend an additional qualitative study.