Segmentation Violation

Only a handful of you will be old enough to remember this reference. But to those who do: I applaud you!

How does one segment our industry? In segmentation, there is power. Because segmentation brings focus. But our industry fiercely avoids any sensible sense of segmentation. Indeed, I would even argue (and I have before) that we do not have an industry but a community of practice.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

When I think about our community, I am gratified to see that we are moving towards an increasing use of the word geospatial instead of the awful abbreviation, GIS (an abbreviation, not even an acronym; do we have that little imagination?) Geospatial encompasses much more of the digital geography experience than the limited notion of desktop geographic data exploration and analysis that GIS implies.

But, yes, in general terms, segmentation is useful because it allows us to understand where we are providing value, and in understanding where we provide value, we can do so repeatably. How, then, does one segment a community rather than an industry? First, we should think about market and firm heterogeneity. In essence, markets and firms have different needs, and the possibility of segmentation lies in those differences. This is very important to us because the difference here is NOT technology but need. Often, we forget about customer needs while getting wrapped up in technology. If we focus on needs, however, we can reach a place where a similar technology, or more generally, a similar capability, can be applied in two different places to meet differing needs, hence a segmentation. This is not to say that the same technology can meet those two segments, but instead that market segments exist which can and should be addressed differently.

If we think about firm heterogeneity, which is more pertinent to the resource-based view of an organization, we can think of firms as having bundles of capabilities and resources. Those capabilities are generally tuned to operate appropriately when applied to a particular market segment. Perhaps you have a manufacturing facility that is big enough to supply only so much material; you then have the capabilities to serve a segment of your market. Without a major refit of your facility, growing that segment is likely complex and expensive but perhaps worthwhile.

No Use Case

In combination, these two ideas provide the competing notions of what your organization can do, the firm’s heterogeneity, contrasted with what the market needs, the market heterogeneity. When these ideas collide, we hope that segments emerge that can be addressed. This discussion touches on the idea of the “use case.” This idea is one of the most troubling crutches of geospatial ( for my older readers, GIS). When a group of entrepreneurial geospatialists imagine, nay guess, new use cases for geospatial technology in professional domains of which they have no experience. I make this statement with much experience of doing just this: hoping that there might be some crock of gold at the end of the colour gradient. Rarely is that the case.

However, don’t let your imagination fester. Push those edges, expand those boxes and ask those questions. Without questions, there is no advancement. But take care not to distract yourself with segments before research.

Segment

When we think about a market segment, the first difficulty is identifying an appropriate slice. I feel that this is the first critical and imaginative step. This is a zero-to-one activity: creating something from nothing, seeing a gap.

To allow this process to work effectively, be curious. Look around yourself and your community for interesting patterns, then question them. Read books, not just non-fiction. Attend conferences to see what others are doing in other professions. Dare I say it: Network <shudder/>. The main purpose here is to expose yourself to new ideas which might challenge you enough to see a gap which can be filled by a product or service you can build.

It is also worth noting that a segment doesn’t have to be big to be big. And it doesn’t have to be obvious to be big. There are some absolutely enormous yet seemingly niche business segments. Who is making rail cars? Who makes breeze blocks? There will be a company that makes those weird, angular containers passenger aircraft use, and there are thousands of those… A company must write software for casinos, I guess? Each of these segments will be massive in its own right, and companies have found their way to excellence in each of these segments by meeting a customer’s needs. But things can always be improved. Is it your time?

Target

Once you have identified a gap, you must decide if you have the appropriate resources to target it. If not, you may need to build an appropriate user interface or retool a cloud infrastructure somehow. Be reasonable, and scrutinize your target segment closely. Are you a reasonable alternative? If you are disruptive, are you so cheap or so much better that you cannot be ignored? Does your future market care about what you are doing, or are they utterly satisfied with the incumbent service providers?

When you are targeting, you should be researching and researching. You should be looking for good reasons not to do something. It is incredibly tempting to succumb to opinion bias at this stage by just looking for agreement. But good strategists keep their minds open. Look for reasons indicating you are wrong, and be intellectually honest about it. Don’t just do things that sound fun unless you are happy burning that money.

I say this from bitter experience.

Position

Finally, position yourself, your team and your product. This final stage, though seemingly less structured, is essential. If you don’t want to succeed, don’t position. Positioning means listening to your future audience. identifying what they might want your product and why it’s much better than what they are doing now. Consider the voice you are using. Consider your presentation as an organization. Consider the services you can and need to provide on top of your product.

As usual, I am writing this post in an airport lounge. I caught some of the rugby World Cup while waiting for my previous flight. And, as much as I hate sporting analogies for business, this part of the segmentation process is all about pace and angles. Find your gap, run at it hard, and when the opposition tackles you, be ready for the hard work because there will be hard work.

Segmentation in Geospatial

A book unto itself. Geospatial, as I stated before, defies segmentation. I believe that the use of digital geography has changed quietly yet completely in the last decade. Yes, GIS as a toolkit will persist for the foreseeable; why wouldn’t it? We will always need to draw boxes around assets. We will always need to undertake ad-hoc geographic data exploration. But the rest, the analysis of those boxes, the distribution of those billions of boxes, as they represent houses or as they move across our planet or as they model any number of esoteric “features with location,” will move into other more useful, and less siloed systems.

In my next post, I will attempt a ham-fisted market exploration. At least, I will describe what I see from my purview. What I see is not the same as what you see. I am frequently wrong, and you might well have a better idea why the bath ornament industry is crying out for some Earth Observation technology. And that is cool; in fact, that might be an amazing use case…