Challenges of defining and implementing strategic market segmentation

Abstract

Much has been written about the discipline of market segmentation as both a marketing competency and ultimately a valuable component of overarching business strategy. Organisations have demonstrated the practical benefits of harnessing segmentation in various market contexts and shown the theoretical constructs of the discipline to be sustainably sound in their capacity to guide businesses towards strategic portfolio optimisation. Despite this rich history however, recent academic investigation has highlighted that deep complexity plagues the effectiveness with which segmentation is harnessed with significant impact on business outcomes.This study was developed from a curiosity to explore some of the identified gaps with specific reference to how these manifest within the South African operating environment. Detailed review of literary perspective on the matter highlighted topical aspects that were deemed meaningful to use as a roadmap to guide the study investigations. Research data was collated from seasoned South African marketing practitioners and used to evaluate their practical experiences of defining and implementing market segmentation against established academic perspective. The study was purely qualitative with data being collected through 10 in-depth interviews that were conducted with target respondents from 10 different organisations across six industry sectors.The findings were analysed using a recently released version of leading qualitative data analysis software enabling the identification of key themes and the construction of resulting association maps. The ensuing network maps ultimately enabled the construction of a consolidated organisational interaction map that typifies the stated experiences of South African marketers in their attempts to leverage and optimize strategic value from market segmentation for their organisations.<p/>