4 Segment-Specific Product Targeting Strategies to Optimize Your Product Prioritization Process

When considering product innovation and creation opportunities, companies must consider whether or not an outcome scenario is well-served, under-served or over-served and use this information in conjunction with segment-specific product targeting opportunity assessments to effectively prioritize product opportunities. Here are 4 segment-specific targeting strategies to ensure your company’s product team is prioritizing the best segment-specific opportunities:

1. Identify and prioritize product innovation or creation opportunities that improve customer outcome scenarios for multiple segments: Product opportunities that satisfy under-served customer needs in multiple market segments have larger potential customer bases, and thus represent larger revenue opportunities. To identify this type of opportunity, your product strategy team first needs to conduct a product outcome scenario analysis for each market segment, then identify the overlapping segment outcomes and finally prioritize all under-served product opportunities that fulfill the multiple market segment outcome scenarios.
2. Build a single product platform for multiple segment-specific solutions: If there are related product outcomes with a significant number of overlapping feature sets across multiple markets, then developing a standardized product platform base that can be customized to serve each segment can be a great means to reduce product development costs. Product platform development and maintenance support are typically two of the most expensive cost factors for a product line, so reducing the number of platforms in a company’s product lines can significantly reduce product production costs.
3. Pursue the least challenging opportunities first: Oft times the most under-served outcome opportunities require a significant amount of capital investment and product development time to achieve the minimum customer outcome requirements, so although they represent great opportunities there are probably other opportunities that can be reached in the short-term while your product team gears up to go after the under-served outcome opportunities. The time to market factor must be considered when prioritizing product development and innovation opportunities.
4. Target segments with attractive price points: By targeting the lowest priced-segment first, your company has the best chance of delivering a product that satisfies customer outcome requirements while operating at a profitable level that existing competitors are unlikely to be able to imitate. Thus, a prioritization premium should always be placed on target segments with lower price points.

By combining these segment-specific targeting strategies to your product prioritization process, your company will ensure that its team is optimally targeting product development and creation opportunities.

If you are interested in learning more about the product management process and organization management, you should read my previous blog posts on assessing new product opportunities and product innovation strategy missteps to avoid. Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about product innovation strategy and customer analytics, I highly recommend reading What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services by Anthony W. Ulwick.