Temporal Segmentation

Laura Ries wrote (and recently updated) a blog entry on Wal-Mart a couple of months ago. The issue was Wal-Mart's experimenting with opening upscale versions of their stores with expensively-priced items. For various reasons about which I've written before, she did not consider the effort promising.

But then she wrote something somewhat obvious but that few product managers incorporate into their strategic recommendations:

"The notion that there are two types of customers, low end and high end, is a fallacy. The same customers will shop in different stores for different things at different price points on different occasions."

When you segment the market into various types of customers, you may have some overlap. Customers can belong to more than one segment; a single customer may fit a certain psychographic profile in one context but a very different one in another context.