Knowing your customers

Who are they?
What do they want?
Why do they choose you?
How did they find you?
What factors influence their decisions for holidays or short breaks?
Are they likely to return?

You probably think that you have a good idea about who your customers are and what makes them return simply through your regular contact with them during their stay with you or through the personalised way you treat them, or because of their patterns of behaviour. This intuitive knowledge about customers is a valuable source of information that helps you to know why your customers return again and again.

But are they the best type of customers for your business? Are there enough of them? Will this market continue into the future?

These questions help us to start thinking about our customers in a different, marketing sense. This process of putting knowledge about the customer and analysis of markets at the heart of what we do is called a marketing orientation. It helps us to think about what we know about our customers in a more strategic way, and it helps to think about the long-term position of the business.

Why?

Because if you don’t understand your market, you will find it more difficult to attract customers in the future and if you do understand your market, you will be able to target them more effectively with your advertising and promotion. This saves money and time and should lead to an increase in customers and/or profitability.

It is unlikely that everyone in the whole market will be interested in your destination, product or services. In the same way therefore, no individual organisation should try to target the whole market. Therefore we need to understand which groups or ‘segments’ of a market are most productive for our organisation and therefore the targets for our marketing activities.

This is achieved through the process of market segmentation. This taster course is designed to help you understand this process. It will define market segmentation and outline the types of techniques used to segment markets, and it will show you how to use market segmentation techniques to gain a better understanding of your customers. It will help you to analyse your customers to build a market profile for them and it will provide you with valuable resources so that you will be able to develop your knowledge of the market trends for these groups. The following section begins by defining what we mean by market segmentation.