Customer Segmentation.. missing goalpost.

Segmentation is the most talked about topic in many marketing or business plan.  Corporations spends numerous man hours to define and deliver the meaning of segmentation for their focus products.

Whether a customer or clusture of customers are Growth/optimizers/economizer, are they investing , how do they see their business, their competitive strength, financial strength, my business with them, my profitability etc etc are various metrics on which corporations develop a plan.  However, the struggle starts from the point when corporations wants to differentiate their offerings/services according to such plans... and eventually land up having the same harmonized price+services offerings to all the customers where large ones/global accounts get the best of the prices (based on volume) along with best of the services (terms) and some joint innovation opportunities.  While the aspiring ones, who are also investing, paying faster & higher, local in strength continues to remain on the other side of these benefits. 

Eventually the large accounts become larger and small becomes smaller and after few years corporations feel that they have too much in the same basket.  And the segmentation plan start over again..... cycle continues.        

Giant Corporations killing Innovation.

Either they are too matrixed or they are too slow to react, but somehow Giant corporations miss to manage a healthy culture of innovation.  They do lot of investments in Innovation workshops/innovation days but fail to recognize that innovation and ideation usually starts from randomness... and few hours of brainstorming off-site session in a room with an outcome of 20 points actually go no-where.  The acceptance of new idea coming from anywhere in the company is very low in most of these giant organisations.

water bottle solar light (ICP lab)

CIO is a busy man these days, he is not leading his team anymore in their core objectives which is innovation. He is busy with budgeting, innovation forecasts, visits of VIP in his proud R&D lab and quarterly reporting etc and he is not alone... some of his strong stalwart are also busy preparing him for such important tasks.

Infact, the giants have an edge of large pool of employees in different geographies and it would be a good idea to nurture this randomness in the company and create some sort of "method in madness" for Innovation speak, somewhat similar to "fundamental research" where a random chemical test may create a new monomer all together. This does not mean to announce " Innovation week" etc but a continuous open forum where random ideas are loved with RESPECT.