بخش بندی بازار در ساخت: تقسیم بندی بازار صنعتی به عنوان ساخت و ساز

This paper takes an empirical starting point in a claim that Biacore, a pioneering Swedish producer of affinity biosensors, was “in the enviable position of creating its own market” (Abelin, 1997). An in-depth case study traces how Biacore undertook segmentation activities while shaping the market for its new product technology, affinity biosensors. This involved stabilising the modes of exchange with customers, the product and the identity of the company. The efforts of Biacore highlight a constructive dimension of market segmentation that hitherto has received little attention. Rather than a process of describing, deciding and taking action, Biacore engaged in the gradual construction of market segments through an interactive and iterative process involving close collaboration with early users. Simultaneously, the market for the new technology gained shaped. Thus, the paper reports a ‘markets from networks’ story illustrating how the practice of segmenting a market may have consequences for that market.

In connection to the initial stock market listing of Biacore, a pioneering Swedish producer of affinity biosensors, stock market analysts Enskilda Securities observed that Biacore was “in the enviable position of creating its own market” (Abelin, 1997:3). For Biacore, the work of creating this market had started more than a decade earlier as part of the development project that led to the launch of the first biosensor in late 1990. During product development, the company had been forced to abandon their envisioned major market segment, medical clinics, and instead focus on research labs, a much smaller potential segment. Following the launch, Biacore worked closely with a gradually growing number of such customers to develop applications for the product. Later, the firm made use of these experiences when devising more standardised marketing programs for different customer groups. This work could broadly be characterised as a process of industrial market segmentation. As part of marketing theory, the principal view of what market segmentation is has remained fairly stable. The basic assumption is that there are groups of customers ‘out there’ in an existing market, with specific characteristics and responses to a marketing mix. As a result, considerable research efforts have been put into refining the segmentation process and the diagnostic techniques both for consumer and industrial markets in order to obtain the best possible ‘market map’ or description. As such, market segmentation is considered as the process of identifying relatively homogeneous customer groups within a defined market (Smith, 1956 and Wind and Cardozo, 1974). More recent work argues that the homogeneity of customer groupings is a managerial assessment, rather than a naturally occurring market phenomenon (Quinn, Hines & Bennison, 2007). In the case discussed in this paper, there was no market for affinity biosensors at the outset. Indeed, there were no biosensors. Under these circumstances, we argue that the production of an actionable map of the market — segmentation — requires more than the employment of descriptive techniques. Market segmentation becomes an emergent and interactive process of shaping that which is to be described. Thus, Biacore undertook segmentation activities alongside efforts to stabilise the modes of exchange with customers, the product and their own identity as a firm. The overall purpose of the paper is to increase our understanding of industrial segmentation processes. Two specific research questions are addressed. First, what is the character of the market segmentation process when performed on a market for a new technology that is ‘in the making’? Furthermore, recent literature in industrial market segmentation suggests that the practice of segmenting a market potentially has consequences for that market. However, there is a paucity of empirical research on how ex ante efforts to segment markets contribute to shape those markets. Thus, we also address a second research question: how do a firm's segmentation activities contribute to (re)shape the market being segmented? Four sections follow this Introduction. In the Section 2, we review relevant segmentation literature. In Section 3, we present the case study. In Section 4, we analyse the case in order to make comparisons with the literature. Lastly, in Section 5 we conclude by discussing our findings and their implications. The case shows how Biacore engaged in an interactive process of segment construction when their initial attempt to address an envisioned target market segment failed. The co-development of use applications with users/customers generated seeds for future market segments iteratively over time. Based on these observations, we argue that different market segmentation activities may be called for when segmenting markets in the making as compared to segmenting ready-made markets. Our major conclusion is that current conceptualizations of industrial market segmentation fail to acknowledge this by exclusively focusing on segmentation as a descriptive practice.

Our analysis suggests that segmenting a market in the making may call for other activities than the ones proposed in the segmentation literature. Our major conclusion is that the conceptualization of industrial market segmentation needs to be expanded to account for constructive aspects in parallel to descriptive ones. Such an expansion will also improve the applicability of segmentation in situations where markets are undergoing significant changes. The analysis showed that the initial activities in the Biacore project fit relatively well with a firm-centred, segmentation-like approach to the working-up of a market, including a relatively clear image of the customers and their needs. When this approach failed, the conditions for the project changed dramatically as did the activities undertaken by Biacore. Although the reasons for this kind of failure constitute an interesting research topic by themselves, they are not our primary concern. Generally speaking, both proactive firm-initiated strategic measures to alter markets and more reactive responses to extra-organisational developments seem plausible. The subsequent activities followed a pattern very different from classic market segmentation. Still, there was an ostensive similarity to segmentation in that the activities indeed produced aggregated groups of customers sharing certain important characteristics. Rather than dismissing these activities as not being about segmentation, we want to discuss how they indeed could be viewed as such.