High-Precision Marketing through Customer Style Accommodation:

Utility Industry Applications

Summary

Traditional volume-based marketing aims at maximizing the number of offering exposures to potential customers. This tends to neglect the great number of rejections involved in such mass-marketing that can undermine the future market.

The paper discusses the alternative approach of emphasizing high-precision marketing where sales can be increased with fewer rejections and greater long-term customer retention through personalization of product development and market communication.

A Decision Style model is presented as a tool for adapting both what is offered and how it is presented to the customers. It is essential that both the developed product and market presentation are done so they accommodate the specific customer decision styles in order to increase sales probabilities.

The Decision Style approach towards high-precision marketing is particularly suitable for accommodating customer styles in the utility industry, given its varied industrial/commercial and residential/household customers. We present some preliminary findings how individuals differ in terms of electric power system preferences (such as how many new services they are interested in and if they want to control the services themselves or let the power supplier do it for them) depending on their Decision Styles.

The entire paper in PDF format.