Discover your potential market segment

The following guide helps you to think about how to segment a market. Where would you start? Which information do you need?

• Start thinking about your business idea and what different customer groups it may have. Do you think that their opinions and value judgments vary? It might be very well the case that you unwittingly uncover that their might be different market segments of customers who might respond in a different way to your idea.
• The next step is that you try focus in more depth on the differences in these opinions and value judgements. Ask yourself if there are differences in where they would use your product/service, how they use it, where they use it, when and why they use it?
• Do you see, beside differences, also similarities in these answers? If so, you just might have uncovered a potential market segment consisting of potential customers who might respond in a homogenous way to your offer.
• Think about more and different kind of customers and repeat this exercise until your assumptions about available market segments are confirmed.
• By this exercise, you have done the groundwork for further developing and refining your value offer (product/service or business idea tailored to specific needs of customer groups).

To become a successful entrepreneur, you need to think about markets in terms of customer segments consisting of customers with similar needs. With this guide, we hope that you reflect upon your own ideas of who might value your idea and why.