Segmentation

Discuss the main criteria which a telecommunications company such as Telecom or Vodafone can adopt to segment its customer markets. Briefly explain the relevant factors that assist in selecting a segment to target marketing efforts. What is positioning and why is it important for ensuring the success of a new offering by a business? 

Criteria which a telecommunications company adopt:

Segmentation on the basis of demography – often deemed to be obsolete, it is still present and, brings value. Companies know how they are taken up by different age groups.

Age does differentiate in various areas and is a link to profiles received from various partners (media, for instance).

Gender may also work.

Occupation and Income surely, for certain particular offers in the market act as basis of segmentation.

Some demographics prevails in the internal databases, some are gathered through research.

- Geographical basis splits urban/rural market, and also detailed regional divisions,

- Research based segmentations: we can include multiple approaches, like attitudinal, motivational, life-style, etc.

Basically, these are different at the base, but they all derive from research, from samples of consumers enquired.

- Behavior based segmentations can be on the basis of internal data available, mixing of traffic and value information (viz, number or duration of calls, service and application usage, value spent on each service, etc).

Factors that assist in selecting a segment /Attractiveness of a Market Segment

These are certain examples of aspects that must be considered when valuation of the market segment is done:

* Present Number of customers and/or number of units

* Growth rate of the given segment

* Competition present in the segment

* loyalty towards the brand by customers in the segment

* Market share that can be attained through given promotional budget and competitors' expenditures

* Market share needed to get break even

*...