Data Driven Customer Segmentation for Vietnamese SMEs in Big Data Era

Abstract

Almost Vietnamese big businesses often use outsourcing services to do marketing researches such as analysing and evaluating consumer intention and behaviour, customers’ satisfaction, customers’ loyalty, market share, market segmentation and some similar marketing studies. One of the most favourite marketing research business in Vietnam is ACNielsen and Vietnam big businesses usually plan and adjust marketing activities based on ACNielsen’s report. Belong to the limitation of budget, Vietnamese small and medium enterprises (SMEs) often do marketing researches by themselves. Among the marketing researches activities in SMEs, customer segmentation is conducted by tools such as Excel, Facebook analytics or only by simple design thinking approach to help save costs. However, these tools are no longer suitable for the age of data information explosion today. This article uses case analysing of the United Kingdom online retailer through clustering algorithm on R package. The result proves clustering method’s superiority in customer segmentation compared to the traditional method (SPSS, Excel, Facebook analytics, design thinking) which Vietnamese SMEs are using. More important, this article helps Vietnamese SMEs understand and apply clustering algorithm on R in customer segmenting on their given data set efficiently. On that basis, Vietnamese SMEs can plan marketing programs and drive their actions as contextualizing and/or personalizing their message to their customers suitably