Qualitative Market Research in the Market Segmentation Process

Now it's time to talk with and listen to customers or potential customers.

The market segmentation team is mining for nuggets, nuggets of insights that tightly and crisply describe groups of customers or potential customers.

Typically, the team commissions focus groups (or in-depth interviews depending on the depth and sensitivity of the information needs of the project). If you are using the ideas generated from your brainstorming or ideation sessions, whether for taglines, pithy ways of describing behavior, or new product concepts or the like, you will want to float these with your hypothesized customer groups (they are not segments yet) to see what resonates.

This often is (and usually should be) a rigorous process. The entire team is involved and in attendance to hear the groups or interviews live. It is often a wise idea to invite and include the extended team or stakeholders so that they understand how the ideas and/or concepts are refined in the process and to hear directly from customers how they think about, use, and relate to your products and services.

You recruit for your hypothesized segments. Your focus group moderator will proceed with general inquiry about the product or service category. You may simply proceed down this path further and further. Or you may switch to quickly testing the ideas the team developed in brainstorming/ideation.

Often, this is done quickly--soliciting top-of-mind reactions from the focus group and then moving on to the next concept. You will want to work through a dozen or so concepts, and then ask the group to compare and contrast and to combine ideas, toss some out, and ask what other ideas or combinations might be even more valuable to them.

If the team emerged from ideation/brainstorming with a list of say twenty potential concepts, your objective in the focus groups might be to winnow and refine the list down to three or four more fully baked concepts that have real traction with your target customers/markets.

To get to this point, an extraordinary effort is required of the market segmentation team. As mentioned above, the members need to attend all of the focus groups or in-depth interviews.

After each group, the team meets to debrief, sorting through what was observed and learned and to revise and refine the concepts. The revised concepts are then taken into the next group and the process continues.

Given that you will need at least a dozen groups for the winnowing process, and more likely sixteen, or twenty or more, this is an exhausting and yet exhilarating exercise.

And it is critical to the success of the segmentation process.

At the end, the team will have two or three or four concepts or nuggets of insight around which to build the quantitative market research instruments.