고객가치와 시장세분화: 새로운 마케팅전략 분석기법

The markets in which organizations compete for customers have changed dramatically in the past decade. Driven by more demanding customers, competition is becoming increasingly global and intense, which has expanded the choices available to customers. Customers, in turn, are becoming more sophisticated in choosing among a larger variety of offerings. Both competitors and customers are having to cope with slower growth economies. In many areas of the world, these forces combine to make customers ever more demanding as they seek higher value in satisfying their needs. Organizations that do not change to meet these dynamic market conditions will struggle at best. Even such leading-edge companies are finding that the old ways of operating are not working, and they are having difficulty achieving the levels of performance that formerly made them great. Past attempts have largely looked internally within the organization for improvement, such as reflected by quality management, reengineering, down-sizing, and restructuring. The next major source for competitive advantage likely will come from more outward orientation toward customers, as indicated by the many calls for organizations to compete on superior customer value delivery. To practitioner and researcher alike, therefore, customer values play an important role in understanding behavior in the marketplace. Managers have been implored to consider their customers when determining which improvements are needed, and customer satisfaction measurement has emerged to bring the “voice of customers” into quality efforts. However, application of customer satisfaction measurement has fallen short of its promise for several reasons. First, many organization have responded by setting customer satisfaction goals and strategies, but only a few have rigorously measured their customers’ satisfaction. Second, even those companies that measure satisfaction may not act on the results. If customer satisfaction measurement is not backed up with indepth learning about customer value and related problems that underlie their evaluations, it may not provide enough of the customer's voice to guide managers in how to respond. If organizations are to become better at competing on superior customer value delivery, they will need a corresponding set of “tools of customer value”. Thus, to understand and find the tools for customer value mechanism, marketers and market researchers devote much attention to understanding why customers buy certain products and brands. In marketing research it’s often assumed that products and services can be characterized by a set of product attributes. Each brand or product is perceived to have a certain level of performance on each of these attributes. The customer ascribes an overall value to a specific product based on how the product is perceived to perform on the various attributes and based on how important these attributes are. In this paper, the author discuss means-end chain analysis as a method to understand why consumers buy certain products or brands. Means-end chain analysis identifies links between product attributes, consequences, and ultimate consumer values. This allows marketers to deal with a broad set of marketing problems, including new product development, brand positioning, advertising strategy, and market segmentation. The author discuss the managerial relevance of the data analysis technique and provide illustration of empirical study, with a special focus on value-based market segmentation.