Understanding the sources of customer dynamics
In marketing analytics, an essential realization for any analyst is that customer behavior is a mutable entity. While assigning customers to a segment provides an organized framework to understand their needs and preferences, this doesn’t imply static uniformity. Rather, within each segment, customers continue to undergo changes, individually evolving at varying paces and trajectories. Over time, this evolution led to the manifestation of diverse preferences within what was once a homogeneous customer segment.
To delve deeper into this idea, we can conceptualize five key categories that drive these customer dynamics. Each category is characterized by distinct rates and levels of impact on customer behavior, ranging from individual to environmental influences. These categories, as depicted in Table 7.1, provide a broader understanding of the dynamics that underlie shifts in customer behavior and preferences.