Business-to-Business-Marktsegmentierung

Business-to-Business segmentation rarely receives the attention that its cousin discipline, customer segmentation, receives.  We at SIS International Market Research have compiled a few considerations for B2B segmentation.  This is not an exhaustive description, but an overview for understanding how business-to-business can help companies to grow their accounts and revenues.  SIS helps companies develop actionable segmentation plans that can boost profitability.

Unternehmen können bei ihrer Segmentierung verschiedene Variablen berücksichtigen.

• Verhalten
• Rentabilität / Kundenwert über die gesamte Lebensdauer
• Nutzen/Attribut
• Conjoint-Analyse
• Verwendung oder Anwendung
• Produktklasse
• Preis-/Qualitätsanforderungen
• Wettbewerber

In Low-involvement product offerings, companies can consider researching usage behavior, buyer behavior, price elasticity / sensitivity and brand loyalty, among others.  For high and medium involvement products, businesses can consider researching their customers’ comprehensive needs, buyer types, business’ buying behavior and core values, among many others.  Lifetime Customer Value as a metric can provide companies a measurement of the value of a client to the firm; with research into each segment done by Lifetime Customer Value and the Pareto principle (80 20 rule), companies can make a concerted effort to improve profitability.  The variables for segmentation will vary by company and industry.

Michael Baker, Autor von „Marketing” asserts that Market Positioning should include quantitative analysis.  He advanced the following quantitative analysis:

Potenzielle Marktgröße x Durchdringungswahrscheinlichkeit

Customer share has received currency in the past two decades over market share as a useful metric.  Companies can estimate market potential with the following quantitative analysis:

Kundenpotenzial im Markt x Kundenanteil

Einige Überlegungen zur Business-to-Business-Segmentierungsforschung:

1. Avoid focusing too much on the product.  Rather, companies might consider a segmentation based on perceived benefits by each segment.  An example of this is with many software companies that focus only on functions, rather than the benefits that customers of many different sizes may perceive.
2. Avoid focusing on company size as a means to meet customer needs.  By putting companies in categories by how many employees they have, these segmentations can miss important insights and make smaller companies feel that their needs won’t be met.
3. Business-to-business segmentation needs to be useful to the company.  While companies can do vast amounts of research, the segmentation information needs to be relevant and actionable.
4. To create a clear market positioning that can be tested.  An example of a positioning statement is:
   Für Manager von Informationssystemen ist Microsoft die Marke für Softwarepakete, die aufgrund zusätzlicher Funktionen, Service und wettbewerbsfähiger Preise das beste Preis-Leistungs-Verhältnis bieten.
5. Kontinuierliches Engagement in der Forschung, da sich die Kundenbedürfnisse schnell ändern

Warum sollte man bei der Marktsegmentierung auf Vielnutzer abzielen?

1. Companies can often extract the most value from these customers because they’re willing to spend.  According to the Pareto Principle / 80 20 Rule, companies can benefit from targeting the 20% of customers that compose 80% of their revenues.
2. Erhöhte Loyalität senkt langfristig die Kundenakquisitionskosten
3. Marketing costs can become cheaper, as customers increase the frequency of purchase

Allgemeine Richtlinien für B2B-Marketing:

• Anfänger
  • Fokus auf Produktvorteile
  • Lernen Sie besser, wenn die Botschaft gut organisiert ist
  • Profitieren Sie von der Mehrfacheinsicht in Informationen
• Experten
  • Konzentrieren Sie sich auf die Produkteigenschaften
  • Erfahren Sie einfach, ob die Nachricht organisiert ist oder nicht
  • Profitieren Sie von einer einmaligen Informationsbeschaffung