Target the Right Market

Jill  Avery; Thomas  Steenburgh

Article | Harvard Business Review | October 2012

Target the Right Market

by Jill Avery and Thomas Steenburgh

Abstract

SparkPlace is a two-year-old business with a hot new product: software that manages and measures the effectiveness of permission-based marketing campaigns for social media. The company is in the process of deciding on which of two customer segments to focus its strategy. Each segment has demonstrable advantages, but developing the product for and marketing to both segments simultaneously could pose big challenges. Is the argument against being "all things to all people" a valid one? If so, which customer segment should SparkPlace target? Or is there a single strategy that can capture the potential value of both types of customers without draining the company's resources?

Keywords: marketing; Market segmentation; customer defection; customer lifetime value; customer relationship management; CRM; market segmentation and target market selection; Marketing Strategy; Product Marketing; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Value and Value Chain; Technology Industry; United States;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Avery, Jill, and Thomas Steenburgh. "Target the Right Market." Harvard Business Review 90, no. 10 (October 2012): 119–123.

Case | HBS Case Collection | January 2019 (Revised October 2019)

Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community

Jill Avery

Glossier’s proclaimed strategy was “born from content; fueled by community.” The digital-first, direct-to-consumer beauty brand had experienced rapid growth, with sales up 600% in 2017 and a customer portfolio that grew by threefold. But, its founder, Emily Weiss, was not complacent. Instead, she dreamed of creating the world’s first socially driven brand that inserted its community into the buying experience so that the company was merchandising people, their opinions, and their content, just as much as they were merchandising products. As her team debates marketing strategies for 2018, they recognize the opportunities and challenges associated with managing Glossier’s rapidly scaling brand community. While the community’s support had emerged organically in the past, the team was now debating whether the company’s next phase of growth would need to be fueled by a greater emphasis on paid peer-to-peer sales representatives, professional influencer marketing, paid media, and a physical market presence.

Keywords: Brands; brand management; brand communication; retailing; e-commerce; DTC; influencer; digital marketing; social media; Startup; internet marketing; big data; crowdsourcing; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Communications; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Venture Capital; Consumer Behavior; Distribution; Growth and Development Strategy; Consumer Products Industry; Beauty and Cosmetics Industry; Retail Industry; United States; North America;

Citation:

Avery, Jill. "Glossier: Co-Creating a Cult Brand with a Digital Community." Harvard Business School Case 519-022, January 2019. (Revised October 2019.) View Details

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In September 2016, Marriott completed its $13.3 billion acquisition of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which added 11 brands to its already robust 19 hotel brand portfolio. Tina Edmundson, Marriott's global brand officer, was charged with making sense of the brand portfolio and designing a strategy that would clearly differentiate each brand from the others and a brand architecture system to communicate to consumers how to navigate among them. She would need to decide whether and how to prune brands from the portfolio, whether and how to combine brands through dual-branding and or sub-branding strategies, and whether, where, and how to use the Marriott parent brand to endorse the remaining brands.

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