Customer-Driven Marketing Strategy

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In the business field, marketing is one of the activities assisting in profiting a single company. The buyers are too many, greatly dispersed, and different in their needs. Therefore, customer driven marketing strategy is being used to see the products or services from the customer’s perspective and communicating the message in customer’s language (Schade, 2007). Basically, customer driven marketing strategy is divided into four major steps: market segmentation, market targeting, positioning and differentiating (Refer to Appendix 1, Figure 1).

The first step is market segmentation. According to Cravens and Piercy (2009), segmenting markets is a foundation for superior performance and it is important to understand buyer’s needs and wants in designing marketing strategy. It is a process of placing the buyers in a product-market into subgroups and it needs to be considered early in the development of marketing-driven strategy (Cravens & Piercy, 2009). Besides that, Cravens and Piercy also stated that segmentation is a recognized process targeted at finding subgroups of buyers within total market. Dickson and Ginter (1987) claimed that “the opportunity for segmentation occurs when differences in buyers’ demand functions allow market demand to be divided into segments, each with a distinct demand function” (pp. 1-10). Moreover, Kotler and Armstrong (2012) maintained that there are four major segmentation variables for customer markets which are geographic segmentation, demographic segmentation, psychographic segmentation and behavioral segmentation. Coincidently, in Dickson and Ginter’s (2009) and Kotler and Armstrong’s (2012) study, the requirement for an effective segmentation must be actionable, substantial and benefit, identifiab...

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