The marketing manager for Audiotronics Software Company is seeking new market opportunities. He is focusing on the voice recognition market and has narrowed down to three segments: the Fearful Typists, the Power Users, and the Professional Specialists. The Fearful Typists don€™t know much about computers€”they just want a fast way to create e mail messages, letters, and simple reports without errors. They don€™t need a lot of special features. They want simple instructions and a program that€™s easy to learn. The Power Users know a lot about computers, use them often, and want a voice recognition program with many special features. All computer programs seem easy to them€”so they aren€™t worried about learning to use the various features. The Professional Specialists have jobs that require a lot of writing. They don€™t know much about computers but are willing to learn. They want special features needed for their work€”but only if they aren€™t too hard to learn and use.
The marketing manager prepared a table summarizing the importance of each of three key needs in the three segments (see table that follows).

Audiotronics€™ sales staff conducted interviews with seven potential customers who were asked to rate how important each of these three needs were in their work. The manager prepared a spreadsheet to help him cluster (aggregate) each person into one of the segments€”along with other similar people. Each person€™s ratings are entered in the spreadsheet, and the clustering procedure computes a similarity score that indicates how similar (a low score) or dissimilar (a high score) the person is to the typical person in each of the segments. The manager can then €œaggregate€ potential customers into the segment that is most similar (that is, the one with the lowest similarity score).
a. The ratings for a potential customer appear on the first spreadsheet. Into which segment would you aggregate this person?
b. The responses for seven potential customers who were interviewed are listed in the following table. Enter the ratings for a customer in the spreadsheet and then write down the similarity score for each segment. Repeat the process for each customer. Based on your analysis, indicate the segment into which you would aggregate each customer. Indicate the size (number of customers) of each segment.
c. In the interview, each potential customer was also asked what type of computer he or she would be using. The responses are shown in the table along with the ratings. Group the responses based on the customer€™s segment. If you were targeting the Fearful Typists segment, what type of computer would you focus on when developing your software?
d. Based on your analysis, which customer would you say is least like any of the segments? Briefly explain the reason for your choice.

Transcribed Image Text:

Importance of Need (1- not important; 10 very important) Market Segment Fearful typists Power users Professional specialists Features Easy to Use Easy to Learn 9