What is a Segment Strategy?

Defining words

• Lying to the boss
• What is a Business Strategy?
• What is a Corporate Strategy?
• What is a Product-Market Strategy?
• What is a Business Unit Strategy?
• What is CRM?
• What is Architecture?
• What is Enterprise Information Architecture?
• What is Strategic Design?
• What are business benefits and value?
• What is DevOps?
• What is Cloud Computing?
• What is a Banking Multi-Channel Architecture?
• What is Gamification?
• What is Crowdsourcing?
• What is a Segment Strategy?
• What is a Business Model?
• What is an Operating Model?
• What is a Target Operating Model (TOM)
• What are Strategic Guiding Principles?
• What is Service Design?
• What is a Customer Archetype?
• What are Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants?
• What is technology-driven change?
• What is a Digital Footprint?
• What is a Potential Trend?
• What are Cloud Standards?
• What is VisaNet?
• What is User Context?
• What are IBM CCRA and CCMP?
• What is PCI DSS Compliance?

In my previous posts on business strategy I talked some about business-unit strategy.  Sometimes a business unit is focused on a particular market.  If an organization wants to create a strategy for a market segment, but for whatever reason doesn’t want to create a business unit around it, then what do you call it?

I call it a “segment strategy”.   The customer segment being important enough to warrant executive leadership (and a strategy) but not important enough to warrant a business unit.  In banking, a “Retail” business unit is typically broken down into broad customer segments such as Ultra High Net Worth (UHNW), High Net Worth (HNW), Affluent and Mass.  These, being broken down further into micro-segments on the way to nirvana where every customer is “a segment of one”.

The segment strategy inherits all of the business-unit strategy content that is general across all customer segments.

A segment strategy provides all the product-market strategies for a broad customer segment, including the 4 P’s.  then it amends the business-unit strategy as needed for the customer segment.  For a retail banking business unit this would include things like how to attract, organize, use and retain key skills such as local/regional private banking and SME expertise.