The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth (Creating and Sustainability Successful Growth)

by Clayton

This chain’s marketers segmented its customers along a variety of psychobehavioral dimensions in order to define a profile of the customer most likely to buy milkshakes. In other words, it first structured its market by product— milkshakes—and then segmented it by the characteristics of existing milkshake customers. These are both attribute-based categorization schemes. It then assembled panels of people with these attributes, and explored whether making the shakes thicker, chocolatier, cheaper, or chunkier would satisfy them better. The chain got clear inputs on what the customers wanted, but none of the improvements to the product significantly altered sales or profits.