The Cambridge Group helps companies optimize their marketing strategies by providing an unmatched understanding of current, emerging and latent customer demand. We blend deep customer insight, big data analytics and economic modeling to help our clients capitalize on profitable opportunities across execution levers, including targeting, positioning, innovation, media and go-to-market strategy. Our proprietary, proven methodologies are customized to each client situation and industry, enabling us to uncover the demand white spaces and performance improvement initiatives that significantly accelerate client growth. We work closely with management to embed demand-driven frameworks, approaches and processes within the organization, creating the foundation for long-term competitive advantage.
Questions we answer:
- Who are the most economically attractive customers to strategically target?
- What is the current, latent and emerging demand of these customers?
- What are the biggest unmet customer needs that we should focus on addressing?
- How can we build our brands and elevate the customer experience?
- How should we position our brands and increase the impact of our communications?
- How can we optimize our product portfolio to maximize incrementality and profitability?
- How can we elevate media ROI by targeting priority segments with a higher degree of precision?
- What should our strategic growth roadmap be?
Segmentation and targeting
Our multi-dimensional Demand Landscape segmentation methodology has transformed the way the industry approaches segmentation, providing the foundation for identification of breakthrough growth opportunities across hundreds of clients over the years. The Demand Landscape provides a 360° degree understanding of the customer, crystallizing and quantifying not only the “who” and “what” of customer behavior, but also the “how” and the “why.” Our approach gives clients superior, actionable insights by mapping where the most profitable demand resides, dimensionalizing the most attractive customer-centric growth opportunities.
Our approach is based on the premise that distinct groups of customers will gravitate to different products, brands and value propositions due to substantial variation in their underlying needs. Developing an unmatched understanding of the differences in customer needs – both met and unmet – helps us identify the demand white spaces to target in order to drive profitable growth.
By applying our methodology, we are able to understand:
- Customer Demand Segments – the distinct groups of customers segmented based on motivations, behaviors and underlying demand drivers
- Need States – the benefit-driven customer usage occasions anchored in a distinct situational context, and characterized by a unique bundle of functional and emotional needs, which are highly predictive of product preference
- Palates and Benefit Domains – the characteristics of the ideal product or service experience customers are seeking, with in-depth insight provided across product dimensions and hundreds of attributes, as well as quantification of gaps between current supply and underlying demand
- Targeting Strategy – clear identification of customer segments and need states to strategically target and prioritize
- Growth opportunity identification, quantification and prioritization… with a clear understanding of how to win across execution levers
Brand messaging and positioning
We help companies build brand value and customer loyalty by developing a value proposition and brand architecture anchored in highly relevant unmet customer needs and clearly differentiated from the competition. Our proprietary Safari methodology follows a disciplined process for brand architecture development and positioning optimization. We work closely with target customers to co-create, test and refine a broad and deep array of positioning statements and messaging options, balancing functional and emotional benefits, in order to arrive at the communications approach that drives the greatest impact.
Customer acquisition and loyalty
We apply our extensive analytics expertise to big data sets (e.g., CRM data) to model the economic value of both current customers and potential prospects. We isolate and quantify the drivers of trial, repeat, loyalty, and attrition in order to identify the strategies, tactics, and offers that elevate conversion across the purchase funnel and increase “stickiness” of the most economically attractive customers.
Marketing and media effectiveness
We conduct a comprehensive assessment of client marketing programs in order to quantify the efficacy of each component of the marketing mix. We help clients move beyond high level demographic targeting by integrating demographics with customer motivations, behaviors, and other demand predictors, enabling a step-change improvement in targeting precision. Additionally, we segment client CRM and media activation data sets via predictive modeling to ensure the right offers are deployed to the right customers with the right messaging. These approaches help our clients optimize investments across marketing channels, ensuring resources are deployed with maximum impact.