Ansätze zur Segmentierung von Kunden — Wie geeignet sind herkömmliche Konzepte?

Summary In markets with more or less interchangeable products, the design of buyer-seller relationships may become a critical factor to differentiate the firm from competitors. In this paper, we focus on how to optimally allocate scarce resources across customers. We show that there is need to segment customers in order to optimally design marketing and personal selling resources (e.g., budgeting, call planning). We show that an optimal allocation of resources has to consider a customer’s size (sales, marginal profit contribution) and responsiveness to marketing measures (elasticity). Against this background, we discuss all segmentation approaches in detail. It is shown that portfolios and scoring approaches are most helpful in segmenting customers in accordance with their economic value. However, these approaches lead to near-optimal solutions only if they first identify criteria which influence size and responsiveness and then optimally weight these criteria. Optimal weights are derived by determining the elasticity of size or responsiveness with respect to these criteria. These weights must be multiplied by the relative changes of the scores of the influencing criteria, summed for size and responsiveness separately, and then finally multiplied by each other.