An athletic apparel and footwear giant was struggling with stagnant revenues despite a strong brand in a growing industry. The company had invested in an attitude-based consumer segmentation a few years back in hopes of reaching relevant micro-segments, but this strategy bore no fruit. The company believed that segmenting consumers behaviorally and reaching out to a broader base would help them achieve their objectives, but they had no successful past segmentation efforts to light their way. They reached out to us, wanting to learn how other companies effectively segmented the market in ways that identified actionable targets and maximized revenue.
At Grail, we understand that segmentation is one of the most likely types of research to fail—as often for strategic and cultural reasons as for methodological ones. In order to ensure an actionable path forward, we conducted discussions with key client stakeholders to assess how the existing segmentation was being used by the business (in product design, marketing, etc.). Based on our client’s goals, we knew that an attitudinal segmentation would not yield the results they needed. Instead, we saw an opportunity to leverage emerging, best-in-class methods for applying predictive modeling to behavioral data, in order to yield action-ready, behavioral segments. We conducted thorough secondary research on these state-of-the-art techniques, following them with interviews of key opinion leaders in the space (strategic consultants, marketers, academia, and designers). The result was a series of clear recommendations for segmenting the market and subsequently activating the consumer segments through product innovations, marketing and merchandising.
"Grail took a thoughtful and thorough approach to developing an assessment of Behavioral Segmentation best practices in ours and external industries. This assessment broadened our understanding of what key competitors are doing, where we needed to improve and contributed to a consumer-centric brand building approach at our company."
We not only provided the client with insights on new and leading-edge techniques to better segment their potential consumer base; we also delivered tactical information on where to source the data, which tools to leverage, how to make the segmentation predictive and how to activate the identified target consumer.
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