#145—Ryan Hamilton: Growing and Managing Customer Segments Successfully

Ryan Hamilton is an associate professor of marketing at Emory University's Goizueta Business School and co-author of The Growth Dilemma: Managing Your Brand When Different Customers Want Different Things. He is also co-host of the podcast The Intuitive Customer, and author of a book by the same name. He has consulted on branding with companies like Walmart, FedEx, Home Depot, Caterpillar, ConAgra, Cigna, Visa, and Ipsos, among others.  

To start a successful brand, you usually need to focus in on a specific, often niche, customer. But to grow the brand, you need to expand your customer base. A few brands have done this well (e.g., Starbucks or Apple) which have this loyal passionate base of fans that stick with them as the brands become ubiquitous. But, more often, brands fail to scale because the new customer they need in order to scale are too different from those core customers. They have different values or needs or beliefs. 

In this episode, we dive into this dilemma, discussing how to predict, preempt, and manage the conflicts that will arise between a brand’s initial customers and the more varied customer segments it must attract in order to scale.  

In this episode we cover: 

• This concept of “CSRM”—customer segment relationship management”  
• Examples of companies who have managed the growth dilemma well and those that have not—and what insights we can draw 
• A practical framework outlining the four types of customer relationship scenarios you may be facing, and what strategies to deploy for each one 
• How brands must be intentional about the type of value they offer

Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
01:14—Introducing Ryan + the topic of today’s episode
03:44—If you really know me, you know that...
05:12—What's your definition of strategy?
05:52—The basis for Ryan's second book, The Growth Dilemma
08:34—Breaking down an "identity of culture," within a brand
11:07—Have brands moved from functional to identity-based culture?
15:30—The concept of CSRM: Customer Segment Relationships Management (and the 2 x 2 matrix)
25:25—Breaking down the different types of customer segment conflicts
38:07—How do you know when you need to "fire" a customer segment?
41:19—How do the principles talked about in this episode apply to the employee segments?
43:30—How does the age of hyper-customization affect customer relationship management?
46:02—How can people continue learning from you?______________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-hamilton-49b3321/
Book website: https://www.growthdilemmabook.com/

Thank you to our executive producer Zach Ness, our producer Nazanin Homayoun Jam and our editor James Pearce. If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, download, and subscribe. I’m your host, Kaihan Krippendorff—thank you for listening.

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