Customer Profiling: Demographic and lifestyle segmentation

Introduction

Susan Jensen and Mary Louise Baker are professional women and mothers who have experienced the difficulties of managing child care in the context of hectic family lifestyles. In response to this challenge, they formed the Cooperative Child Care Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This organization provides educationally oriented child care services to working parents on a 4:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., seven-day-a-week schedule. Parents contract for a specific number of hours each week but can adjust them to their professional and personal schedules.

The Cooperative Child Care Center (CCC) also has a bartering dimension. Parents who complete the organization's training and certification process may perform child care duties as payment for the services they purchase from the center. This helps parents, especially those with several young children, manage the financial demands of child care more effectively.

The center has been quite successful, developing a client base of 300 families in its first two years of operation. However, Susan and Mary Louise believe that many more parents in the Minneapolis area could benefit from the center's services. They could serve these families by increasing the number of clients in the current service area and/or opening new centers in other parts of the city. Over the longer term, they believe that the Cooperative Child Care Center concept could be franchised to owner-operators in other cities in the United States.

To pursue these growth strategies, Susan and Mary Louise wish to develop a profile of existing clients and use it to guide their marketing efforts and expansion program. Specifically, they want to identify the core demographic characteristics of their clients, their lifestyle segmentation patterns, and their buying behavior relative to child care. They will then use this profile to locate clusters of families that match this profile and, therefore, offer opportunities for growth.

In this lab, you will use web-based business geographic information system (GIS) tools to help Susan and Mary Louise create a comprehensive profile of their clients and use it to seek opportunities in the Minneapolis area.

Location

Minneapolis-St. Paul core-based statistical area (CBSA)

Time to complete the lab

60 to 90 minutes

Prerequisites

An understanding of the importance of customer profiling in developing marketing strategies management

Access to ArcGIS Explorer Online with a web browser

Data used in this lab

Demographic and consumer spending data at various levels of geography

Internal Cooperative Child Care Center client data

Tapestry Segmentation data

Market Potential Index (MPI) data from GfK Mediamark Research & Intelligence, LLC (GfK MRI)

About this Lab

Title: Customer Profiling: Demographic and lifestyle segmentation

Author: Fred L. Miller

Level: 1, engagement

Requirements: ArcExplorer Online

Keywords: marketing; business GIS; business; customer profiling; segmentation; targeting; market penetration; market expansion

File: Bus_01c_CustProfiling.doc

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