What my local Caffe Nero teaches us about customer segmentation

You can treat your customers the same because they all buy your service, right? And its easier for your operations if you  do so why make it more complicated? Because finding and keeping customers gets a whole lot harder if you do

Take Caffe Nero as an example. It’s the coffee and the italian experience customers love and so, to maintain or grow their business all they need to do is keep doing what they’re doing: hire young italian barista’s, offer uncomplicated food and drink choices and operate in easy to access high footfall locations.

That’s one way to look at it and works for most. But looking at your customers as homogenous group defined by their appetite for your product is not a smart way to think about customers. Just  go into one and observe who’s there. The longer you stay, the more you’ll recognise their differences

• The office worker picking up a latte on the way to work
• The mothers getting together after dropping the kids off at school
• The recruitment consultants in the corner who spend all day there interviewing candidates
• The out of town consultants meeting colleagues
• The secretaries picking up sandwiches for their team

I could go on but you get the point.

Each of these types exhibit peculiar behavioural characteristics based on the job they are hiring Caffe Nero to perform for them. Their time constraints are different and so some will not come in at all if there’s a queue whilst others won’t mind; the product mix they buy varies enormously between groups as does their average spend.  And they value  facilities completely differently  (loos, free broadband, quiet areas, sofas or chairs etc). Crucially,  each group has a competitive frame which may not involve a coffee shop or spending money (they could t the office or home, at my club, hotel lobby etc).

This is the same for every business: customers are not the same and if you want to keep them and/or find more, you’ll be more effective thinking of them as behavioural segments not product users. And by doing so, everyone in your team will understand the part the can play to engage customers much more saliently.

Happy customers, fulfilled staff, better returns for backers. Sounds like a happy exchange to me.

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