In the current challenging economic environment, companies are fighting to keep what they have built through the last years after consumer confidence has halted in a highly volatile and insecure business landscape. Most organisations struggle to cut down costs in their supply network and refrain from investing in new capital, as the estimations for return to global economic growth are not optimistic at all.
Meanwhile, more and more companies emphasize on the ever-growing importance of customers as servicing a customer is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage for most of them, as more demanding customers, global competition and slow-growth economies and industries push them to search new ways to achieve and retain such an advantage over their competitors.
The business sector most challenged by the current recession is the Consumer Packaged Goods industry, as consumers that are becoming more and more price sensitive are at-tracted by low-cost private label items, in an effort to reduce their everyday spending. CPG companies have already achieved significant optimisations in their upstream sup-ply chain, but the always volatile downstream supply chain might exhibit a high cost to serve, so high as to erase any improvement made in previous stages of the supply chain.
This study promotes customer segmentation as a solution in establishing an overall profitable downstream supply chain, while at the same time maintaining high levels of service and customer satisfaction. Using action research, combined with a ten-year working experience in a popular food & beverage organisation in Greece, with active involvement in segmentation projects, we will present a comprehensive framework to deploy the customer segmentation approach in all nodes of a CPG supply chain.
I would especially like to thank my supervisor Professor Eleftherios Iakovou for provid-ing valuable guidance and encouragement in completing this dissertation.
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