Industrial market segmentation is a scheme for categorizing industrial and business customers to guide strategic and tactical decision-making. Government agencies and industry associations use standardized segmentation schemes for statistical surveys. Most businesses create their own segmentation scheme to meet their particular needs. Industrial market segmentation is important in sales and marketing.
Webster describes segmentation variables as “customer characteristics that relate to some important difference in customer response to marketing effort”. (Webster, 2003) He recommends the following three criteria:
Measurability, “otherwise the scheme will not be operational” according to Webster. While this would be an absolute ideal, its implementation can be next to impossible in some markets. The first barrier is, it often necessitates field research, which is expensive and time-consuming. Second, it is impossible to get accurate strategic data on a large number of customers. Third, if gathered, the analysis of the data can be a daunting task. These barriers lead most companies to use more qualitative and intuitive methods in measuring customer data, and more persuasive methods while selling, hoping to compensate for the gap of accurate data measurement. Substantiality, i.e. “the variable should be relevant to a substantial group of customers”. The challenge here is finding the right size or balance. If the group gets too large, there is a risk of diluting effectiveness; and if the group becomes too small, the company will lose the benefits of economies of scale. Also, as Webster rightly states, there are often very large customers that provide a large portion of a suppliers business. These single customers are sometimes distinctive enough to justify constituting a segment on their own. This scenario is often observed in industries which are dominated by a small number of large companies, e.g. aircraft manufacturing, automotive, turbines, printing machines and paper machines. Operational relevance to marketing strategy. Segmentation should enable a company to offer the suitable operational offering to the chosen segment, e.g. faster delivery service, credit-card payment facility, 24-hour technical service, etc. This can only be applied by companies with sufficient operational resources. For example, just-in-time delivery requires highly efficient and sizeable logistics operations, whereas supply-on-demand would need large inventories, tying down the supplier's capital. Combining the two within the same company - e.g. for two different segments - would stretch the company's resources.
Nevertheless, academics as well as practitioners use various segmentation principles and models in their attempt to bring some sort of structure.
The goal for every industrial market segmentation scheme is to identify the most importantly significant differences among current and potential customers that will influence their purchase decisions or buying behavior, while keeping the scheme as simple as possible (Occam's Razor). This will allow the industrial marketer to differentiate their prices, programs, or solutions for maximum competitive advantage.
While similar to consumer market segmentation, segmenting industrial markets is different and more challenging because of greater complexity in buying processes, buying criteria, and the complexity of industrial products and services themselves. Further additional complications include role of financing, contracting, and complementary products/services.
Approaches
A generic principle
One of the recommended approaches in segmentation is for a company to decide whether it wants to have a limited number of products offered to many segments or many products offered to a limited number of segments. Some people recommend against businesses offering many product lines to many segments, as this can sometimes soften their focus and stretch their resources too thinly. See figure 1.
The advantage in attempting the above approach is that although it may not work at all times, it is a force for as much focus as practicable. The one-to-many model ensures – in theory – that a business keeps its focus sharp and makes use of economies of scale at the supply end of the chain. It “kills many birds with one stone”.