Today’s interview is with Ryan Hamilton, an Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, an author and the co-host of The Intuitive Customer Podcast with Colin Shaw. Ryan joins me today to talk about his new book (The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things), why an obsession with growth can be counterproductive, what the heck SRM is, why marketers should be thinking about customer segment compatibility and what happens when a brand serves incompatible segments, amongst other things.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Employee understanding and cracking the code of a better employee experience – Interview with Annette Franz – and is number 547 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Ryan:

• Recently co-authored a new book with a colleague, Annie Wilson, entitled “The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things,” which has been published by Harvard Business Press.
• In business school, we tell students, “We’re going to deal with one target customer.” If you can figure out how to make this one segment of customers happy through your positioning and branding, then we can expand that later to multiple segments.
• However, nobody is teaching people how to manage multiple segments.
• The basic thesis of the book is that as you grow and add more customer segments, you need to also start worrying about managing the relationships between those segments, as those customers can influence the experience of other customers just by being there and also buying from the brand.
• There’s nothing wrong with growing your business. However, when it becomes the only measure of success, it results in dysfunctional management decisions.
• SRM (segment relationship management) is a discipline we hope to introduce as a part of managing growth.
• When we identify a new segment, we should be asking……what’s that segment going to do to our current segments? Are they going to get along? Will there be multiplicative growth? Is that going to be a really great additive thing? Or will it cause a lot of conflict and problems?
• The segment compatibility framework provides people with a language and framework for thinking through how adding a new segment would impact our existing customer base.
• We defined four different types of relationships that can exist between segments.
• Consider Nike, which has separate communities; however, when these communities are not managed well, they can fall into conflict.
• Take Carhartt, that is a traditional workwear brand but also a brand favoured by the skating and artist communities. This wasn’t done intentionally by the brand. This is people adopting it and creating their own segment. And then the brand followed them.
• Make sure you’ve defined your segments in terms of what they want and what they need rather than in terms of what they look like. It is going to be really, really difficult for you to identify potential areas of conflict if you’re thinking about your customers in that way.
• My biggest piece of advice is if you want to try to anticipate problems with adding new customer segments, know what your customers want by segment, what they need, why they’re choosing you, and why they’re not choosing you. If you can do that, you are very far along this path to being able to manage those relationships well.
• There might be some clues in your data about emerging new segments. Look for the people who don’t really fit your profile and keep an eye on them because they might be an emerging segment that you might want to nurture, follow, or look into.
• Ryan’s best advice: Know what matters to your customers. Know what their value is, know what they need, and know what is important to them.
• Ryan’s Punk CX brand: Disney

About Ryan

Ryan Hamilton is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. He received his PhD in Marketing from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is an award-winning teacher and researcher, and his research findings have been covered in Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and CNN Headline News. He has consulted on matters of pricing, branding, and customer experience with Fortune 100 companies, and is a sought-after keynote speaker and trainer on various topics in marketing and decision-making.

Ryan is an author (The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things) and podcaster (The Intuitive Customer Podcast), and has produced two lecture series for The Great Courses. He has an eclectic background that includes both an undergraduate degree in physics and time spent performing stand-up and sketch comedy.

Check out Ryan’s new book – The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things – and feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Photo by Nik on Unsplash