How can marketers effectively use “smart segmentation” techniques to more effectively target and communicate with their customer segments? Daniel Winzer and Nikolaus Zottl from marketmind discussed this and related questions with our new MSc Marketing cohort in the course of the Customer-Centric Management class. Smart segmentation, as put by marketmind, is positioned in between mass marketing and hyperpersonalization and always aims as better understanding WHAT and, even more critically, WHY our customers are doing what they are doing. Smart segmentation starts with a segmentation of the entire market, followed by segmentation efforts of a firm’s existing customers with the help of primary market research based on a representative customer sample. Finally, predictive modelling is then used to allocate all customers in a firm’s data warehouse to their specific segment. Based on this, customer-centric management can be turned into practice quite effectively, as was vividly illustrated by successful use cases from swisscom, Austrian, IKEA, BAWAG PSK, durchblicker, OMV, and Merkur.