Global Healthcare market segmentation

A top down approach to segmentation

We've recently carried out a global segmentation in the healthcare market, working with a client who wanted to take a completely fresh look at the broad landscape it operates in. Instead of looking at how people segmented in individual product categories, we delved into what people feel about a macro healthcare issue at a more fundamental level, giving us a top down rather than bottom up view of the market available.

To do this, we started by understanding how marginal consumers behave, their attitudes and the choices they make. We spoke to people with compromised immunity, business travellers and healthcare professionals, and we used twitter style mobile information capture to get a real-time perspective. Our ethnographic sessions included travelling with people as they went about their daily routines, rummaging though their cupboards and even looking down their toilets. We also involved respondents in online tasks, which helped identify hotspots in their homes. And we did this in six major markets – UK, US, Russia, Australia, Korea and Brazil.

This gave us a framework for the segmentation and a real and deep understanding of people's innermost motivations and beliefs.

Next we developed this quantitatively and identified new segments through relentless revisiting of the data using latent class analysis (LCA). LCA allows us to pull together a wide range of variables, not just behaviours or attitudes, to create meaningful segments. Then we explored and developed the solutions in workshops to make sure everyone agreed with the direction we were taking and that each new solution met the company's business objectives.

Now we're hoping to roll out a lite version of the segmentation so that more markets can benefit from the study. And our client has a robust framework for aligning their brands across widely different markets, and for developing new products - products that meet people's holistic needs not simply their situational needs.