Live From Orlando: Clustering Comes to the Telecomm Industry
Marketers that use clustering systems to segment targets into subsets by geography or economic status have a new set of criteria on which to slice and dice households: By telecommunication equipment use.
TeleClusters, a new product from Southfield, MI-based The Polk Company, designates each American household as belonging to one of 23 unique clusters, based on responses a projectable sample gave to a 25-question survey. The clusters are based on 50,000 respondents to a quarter-million survey mailing Polk conducted, and are projectable to the company’s entire 106-million household database.
According to Polk director, market development, telecommunications business development Kurt S. Besch, the telecommunications industry was an ideal starting place for a product-use-based segmenting system. The geographic and predictive data the industry had relied on, he told DIRECT Newsline, was not giving marketers usage information, such as time spent with each product or presence of related services. As a result, marketers were not getting information that would facilitate cross or upselling.
The industry can use TeleClusters for prospecting as well, renting lists based on a household’s propensity for adapting new technology, or avoiding names that have a high likelihood of “churn”, or rapid abandonment of a new service before becoming profitable customers.
The product reflects a shift in the industry away from blind acquisition to qualification of potential customers. “Cellular companies were the first to see it,” said Besch. “Churn is immediate and acquisition costs are steeper.”
