Mercs & Perks, a basis for customer segmentation?

Shortly after The Wall came down in Berlin, we worked with a client in Russia, helping to raise the bar in retailing by investing in development of wholesale and retail standards as a basis for optimising emerging routes to consumer.

Given limited resources, we needed a way of selecting customers that would be most receptive to - at that time - state of art retailing techniques. In other words, we needed to distinguish between those retailers/wholesalers that had the right attitude in terms of growing their business but lacked the knowledge and skills, and those that were simply in it for the Mercs & Perks.

This meant we could focus on helping KAMs to develop customers’ skills in key aspects of retailing aiming at improving ROI, basket-size, sales/sq. ft., net margin, stockturn and shrinkage.

This made the customer more demanding of the right things, but even tougher for the competition...

Time for a really fundamental approach to customer evaluation?