Creating Customer Value for Generation Y

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Leadership and Human Resources - Generation Y, Generation Z, grade: 1,0, AKAD University of Applied Sciences Pinneberg, course: MKE 01, language: English, abstract: Companies nowadays face high competitive markets and very different needs and buying behaviors of consumers. It is therefore a reasonable strategy to segment all potential buyers into distinguished segments. In order to serve these segments more effectively, a company has to understand what the specific needs in such a segment are and how to satisfy them. It is essential that the process of serving a special market segments fits to the market. Otherwise the profits will suffer of lower revenues or higher costs. When marketers seek for similarities within consumers they use age - and in a broader sense, generations - as a segmentation criterion. One of these generations is the so called "Generation Y". Born between the beginning of the eighties and the mid nineties, this group cohort is today between fifteen and thirty years old. Nowadays they are coming into work life and are therefore a valuable customer segment with increasing buying power. It is said that this generation has its own set of needs and ways to buy. So it is interesting to analyze how the Generation Y can be reached by companies. The creation of special customer value for Generation Y for Apollo-Optik will be discussed in this paper. Generation Y will be defined, as well as what is meant by customer value. The company Apollo-Optik will be presented with its products and markets served. Thereafter, this paper is going to analyze the Generation Y for Apollo-Optik with regard to different segmentation criteria. The creation of a special value for a homogenous segment will be discussed at the closing stages.