Applying long-standing business concepts and popular terms, can help you break-down a business case and can exemplify your team's critical thinking to judges familiar with the business world.
Terms shown below that are boldface and underlined are several key concepts you fill useful as you explain your analysis in any Business Case competition. After the brief introdcution on Market Segmentation below, many general business conecepts and terms are shown for further team discussion and their related application. Along with the "BASICS OF BUSINESS" post below, these terms should give your team a competitive advantage!
Marget Segmentation
Market segmentation is one of the key approaches to defining and targeting specific markets. Dividing a market into distinct groups of buyers enables the planning of product mixes, marketing mixes, growth and retention strategies, and overall corporate and competitive strategies.
Effective market segmentation:
Improves understanding of the customer base
Provides a clear classification of the customers
Enables the generation of a targeted product portfolio that responds to the needs of the market place
Helps gauge a company's market position relative to the competition
Leads to the effective fine tuning of marketing strategies
Types of Segmentation are vaired, and can be uniqly tailored to an industry or even a company. Popular segmentation models can often be split amongst companies as they focus on the Consumer (B2C) or Business market (B2B).
Popular Consumer Market Segmentation approaches:
- Geographic (urban vs. rural, regional, by city, etc.)
- Demographic (age, gender, education, etc.)
- Psycographic (values, attitudes, lifestyles, etc.)
- Behaviourial (loyalty, price sensitivity, etc.)
Popular Business Market Segmentation approaches:
- Geographic
- Buyer Behaviour (payment terms, etc.)
- Customer type (industry, size of company, position in value chain, etc.)
Business Terms:
- Customer Retention
- Customer Loyalty
- ARPU (Average Revenue Per Unit)
- Corporate Strategy
- Customer Value Proposition
- Brand
- Brand Positioning
- Competitive Analysis & Strategy
- Market Share
- Key Success Factors (KSFs)
- Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
- Shareholder Value
- Accountibility
- Customer and Market Research
- 80/20 Rule (i.e. Pareto Principle)
- Empower vs. Delegate
- Competitive Advantage vs. sustainable Competitive Advantage
- 4Ps and 6Ps of Marketing
- High-Value Customers vs. Mass Market (see 80/20 rule)
- Cross-selling vs. Up-Selling
- Management Team
- Leadership
- Direct Marketing (Direct Mail, Telemarketing, Email, etc.)
- Social Marketing (Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc.)
- Mass Marketing (Newspaper, TV, Radio, Outdoor)
- Affinity Marketing (Loyalty Programs, Sponsorships, etc.)
- Public Relations and Corporate Communications
- Value-Chain
- Franchise
- Centralization vs. Distributed
- Commoditization
- Cash-flow vs. Profitablity
- First-mover Advantage
- Organic growth
- Partnership
- Patent
- Product Life-Cycle
- Share of Wallet
- Channel Partner
- Strategic Alliance
Many of these terms can be further researched online and via this resource at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Business_terms.
Comments