How to Use Scenarios to Create Buyer Segments

You are probably familiar with the idea of scenario analysis used in strategic planning: You focus on different possible future outcomes to design a strategy that is flexible enough to accommodate various contingencies.

By developing multiple scenarios, your company attempts to anticipate what might happen in order to develop a strategic response in advance. In this instance, scenario-building for strategic planning is used to create potential actions based on a possible set of conditions or circumstances.

But what if we stepped back and thought about using scenarios as a creative way to segment the market? After all, different customer sets face different scenarios that trigger their response. By understanding the various scenarios that different customers face, you can take a unique marketing approach to each scenario. This is what is known as scenario marketing.

To understand how to apply the concept of scenario marketing, let's start by defining "scenario." Webster helps us to formulate a definition: "an imagined sequence used to account for a possible course of action or events."

By analyzing the possible scenarios that each customer segment potentially faces, you can create marketing strategies and programs suited for a particular scenario. Let's create an example to illustrate the concept.

Imagine that you manufacture, market, and sell instrumentation for testing, measurement, and monitoring. If you used a traditional approach to segmentation, you might segment your customers into verticals, perhaps network-equipment manufacturers, semiconductor manufacturers, and cable service operators. If you took a persona approach to segmentation (creating a rich picture of an imaginary person who represents each targeted user that takes into account that person's experience, tasks, objectives, etc.), you might segment your customers into buyer types, such as network operators, laboratory managers, test engineers, directors of manufacturing, etc.

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