How to Define a Market Segmentation Map
By Geoff Anderson
At this point the team undertook the task of defining the cities, or groups of USER communities. The USER segments we added, cutting across USE segments and sub-segments include:
Teaching – Used in an instructional setting |
Principal Investigator – purchased by a researcher for a specific project |
Multiuser facility – Shared Laboratory with multiple projects |
Analytical Services Lab – centralized analytical lab with multiple technologies |
Process and Method Development |
Quality Control and Assurance |
Failure Analysis |
Key – Blue academic & government labs, Red Industry/corporate
This list was the culmination of a long and contentious debate. The most amazing aspect is that when we started this exercise the technical stakeholders scoffed that we could not possibly come up with a scheme to break our market into such a compact representation. Their “aha” moment when we started testing the hypothesis’ with sales history and customer input was remarkable. None of them could break the model. It was at that point that we realized that we had a winner, and truly had captured the essence of our market opportunity.
