Segmenting Customers in Mature Industrial Markets

Abstract

In mature industrial markets, segmenting customers on size, industry, or product benefits alone is rarely sufficient. Customer behavior in terms of tradeoffs between price and service is an important additional criterion. The authors offer a framework for such buying-behavior-oriented microsegmentation of industrial customers. They apply the framework to segment the national accounts of a large industrial company and show how the results of a segmentation study can be used to redirect the firm's resources and customer segments.