Business Analytics for Sales and Marketing Managers: How to Compete in the Information Age

NEEDS-BASED SEGMENTATION CREATED FROM QUESTIONNAIRE DATA

This section takes you through how you can make a needs-based segmentation on already existing questionnaire data. This segmentation can be used to identify target groups for individual one-off campaigns; alternatively this segmentation can be used as a first step toward scoring your entire customer base in your DW according to the same principles. (You can read more about this in Chapter 1 in the section called “Segmentation and Data Warehousing.”)

The process presented in this chapter (see Exhibit 4.12) includes five steps. It is quite long but also typical for how, once in awhile, you have to simplify questionnaire data in order to allow analysts to make some overarching conclusions; rather than present a long series of interesting but unactionable correlations.

Exhibit 4.12 Content and Order of This Section

In the next example, all that the travel agent sold was skiing trips. There was only one product but many destinations, and they could be looked up in a catalog. The company’s first step was to hire two students to make a survey identifying the different customer groups and their needs.

Identify Usable Questionnaire Data

When I became involved in the analysis, the two students had made the survey but were drowning in data. They had gotten into this situation because they were uncertain about what to ask for, so they ...